Do you remember ZMH? Zone Mail Hour? If you had a public BBS, you had to disallow logins during ZMH, so that your phone line was reserved for netmail and echomail delivery.

I was just a lowly point, so I didn't have to bother with that crap. 2:201/274.9 representin', yo.

The funniest part about the star-shaped network was that it was more of a feudal society than a democracy. And of course it devolved into political fights among the lowly nodes and points who thought the stupid RCs and NCs had way too much power over the network and wanted it to become more democratic, but since the coordinators (Did you call them stars in zone 1?) footed the bill for the long-distance message deliveries, it was usually their way or the highway.

Funnily enough, Sweden abolished the concept of long-distance calls sometime in the 90s, which drastically undercut the power of the controllers. :-)

The reason for ZMH was that a node making a connection to another node required the use of a physical phone line where one node would dial the other, which would stop anyone else from connecting to those two nodes. So if you had a lowly user logged on to your BBS, noone else could log on to it, and you couldn't send or receive Fidonet mail.

Contrast that with TCP/IP where it's possible to have millions of active connections to other nodes on a single node without breaking a sweat, and it's just a ridiculous comparison.

Another hilarious quirk of the times was that almost noone was running a multitasking OS (Amiga users: shut up!), which meant that once someone had called your Frontdoor system and delivered mail, it would exit, and start your mailer (Fmail!), which would uncompress the received file, put all the messages in your local message db (We're talking flatfiles of course, SQL was nowhere in sight), and prepare packages for all your downstream nodes, and after that it would start up Frontdoor again, at which point you could finally receive calls again.

So not only were the systems unable to handle more than one connection at a time, there was also no background processing, so while your computer was busy unpacking an enormous serveral-hundred-kilobytes zip file of mail, it couldn't accept any calls.

Oh, oh! And there was no Unicode, not UTF8, so there was a years-long technical debate/flamewar/ridiculous shoutfest about which character set to standardize on, where the main contenders were CP437 vs. ISO-8859-1.

Looking back, it's amazing it worked at all, but it did, and that was fucking magic.

Fido's hub-and-star system existed to more efficiently move mail. Many of the Net- and Zone-level coordinators didn't run huge BBSes with lots of phone lines that could move the large (for this era of slow modems) amount of mail that could be generated. Volunteers with more money and expertise formed a mail routing system outside of the Fido leadership hierarchy to get the job done. Some better-funded local person in your Net would step up and become a "hub". All of the local BBSes would send their mail to the hub, which would make a long-distance call a few times a day to send mail upstream to a "star", which was basically the same thing, just moving much more mail at a higher level in the hierarchy. Stars would call other stars and move the mail over long distances, including across continents. The stars were the real power-holders in Fido.

I was just a little bit too young to get access to BBS in my youth.

I was 2:201/274.9. My upstream node that I connected to was 2:201/274. He connected to his upstream hub, 2:201/200, who in turn connected to his upstream net coordinator, 2:201/0, whose upstream was the regional coordinator, 2:20/0, and finally up to the zone coordinator, who I think was 2:0/0 or something.

A zone was a continent, 2 was Europe. Regions were countries in Europe, 20 was Sweden. Each region could have any number of networks, Sweden had like 5, and network 1 was the Stockholm area. Each network had hubs and nodes, and the guy who ran the node I talked to was simply the 74th node of the 2nd hub. Finally, since I didn't have a public BBS, I was a private point, the 9th on my node.

So putting it all together, a Fidonet address is zone:regionnetwork/hubnode.point.

Why weren't there separator characters between the region and the networks, or the hub and the nodes? Who knows, it worked. :-)

Because the original scheme didn't account for these intermediate levels. 2:201/274 was supposed to talk to 2:201/0, which was supposed to talk to 2:0/0. Doesn't scale, so they introduced the 10^n scheme for subdivision (whose precise limits differed between zones)

Bowmanville would call Oshawa which was a local call.

Oshawa would call Pickering which was a local call.

Pickering would call Scarborough again a local call.

Scarborough would call Toronto and Toronto would call Mississauga.

All the message relays would just use local calls, but if you left any of the stop out you would need a long distance call. So all our local message did not cost us.

I was just a kid (teenager) so I didn't have the funds to run a BBS myself. But I remember the 60 minute limits, the long lists of local BBSes, the ANSI graphics, Maximus, RemoteAccess and others (I had played with a few in the hopes of starting a BBS, but that era was starting to end when I graduated in the early 2000s), Door games, RIP graphics (the very early days of vector art on VGA screens).

There were door games like Baron Realms Elite where BBS sysops would get together and play BBS against BBS (of course many people had player accounts of multiple BBSes but it was all part of the fun and the years of protection added a decent balance to the game).

Games from that era were so much better than this Free-To-Play with micro-transactions crap. I understand it earns mobile game companies a ton of money (from a tiny % of the population that spends $200 to $5000 on a single game), but the shareware model of first 10 levels free, next 30 levels for $x made for much better games. Plus it gave people something to exchange from board to board; the whole upload/download ratios (which kids from the torrent era should really learn about--because it existed then and for legal shareware on the majority of BBSs).

I remember once getting an amazing side scrolling shooter from Japan. It may have not been shareware, but it was impossible to tell. It had no readme and I couldn't read anything on the screen. :-P It was super fun though, and I remember thinking of all the hops it must have taken (those people who make long distance BBS calls, or maybe just someone who brought disks over on a holiday) to get to a BBS in my small town.

I also remember Doom coming out, and all the Sysops talking about how amazing a game it was. I think it was 3 disks though; took either three days (60 minutes time limits) or hopping to three different BBSes to get all the disks. Then it said I needed a 386 or higher (I had a 286). I took it to a friends house who had a 486. His mom was a super Christian. She watched us play a few levels and that didn't really end well.

After googling, I just realized that Maximus 3.0 eventually included RIPscrip support built-in, but I had lost interest in my BBS and moved on to hacking on Unix systems by then.

But I remember RIPscrip being a nice format. Thanks for providing me with many an afternoon spent tinkering with it.

I liked how they were turn based (each user got X turns per day) and one player played at a time, but you were playing in a multi-player world against other people who would take their turns for the day.

I always thought it'd be interesting to do something similar in modern day, where you could take turns offline in a game (eg. in a subway or something, without internet access) and when you had online access, those turns were submitted against other people in the game. I wonder if there is anything like that?

RIP graphics were progress and a great innovation.

Of course, these days you'd probably be able to just buy an extra day for 500 gold coins...

It's amazing to me is how many people volunteered their time, hardware, and money to keep these systems running for free.

I dreamed of running a big Fido hub. Sadly, Fido vanished before I reached the income level where I could have a bank of phone lines making long-distance calls all day and not worry about it. Just running a single phone line was an expensive challenge for me as a young kid. It took a lot of bussing tables at a hamburger joint.

I made friends with a fellow in Texas that claimed he had won a counter suit against AT&T for false phreaking charges and settled out of court for some number of years of free long distance. Because of this he would call my board and push me the mail from our other nodes every day and save me the money.

Now that I'm older the story sounds implausible and I think the dude might have just been lonely.

It was a lot of fun getting messages from boards in South Africa and other places every day. A very prominent HNer ran a BBS that was also a member of the network though I'm sure they wouldn't appreciate being outed! Such fun times.

I used a mailer front end called Intermail, and I remember at age 15 it was unimaginably complicated to set up.

I remember when, as a kid, if you answered the phone and it was a long distance call for mom or dad, we would run to get them yelling "Long distance! Long distance!"

Every second was precious.

I believe there's an exception for controlling remote devices when you need to make sure some rando doesn't brick your pricy gear.

USR offered substantial discounts to BBS operators to keep us from buying cheap gear. I pre-ordered some pre-v.34 (upgradeable) Courier V.Everything for my board at BBSCon for $249/ea. I think that's about what a Sportster 14.4K was selling for at the time.

1) Administrators running their own instance that they can customize and have local conversations on, and

2) FidoNET, where instances relay messages to each other across a network.

I had worked on a similar network at the time which used Frontdoor in front of the BBS to call other boards and relay the messages (and receive calls from boards), but was never a part of the FidoNET network myself.

Haha - also "I was too scared of my parents" .. me too. There was not as much darkness as the skull images suggest, but trying to look 3l33t was /<-rad and all. RemoteAccess ("RA") was a nice software, I used that myself for a short time.

I remember that I had a strict limit of $13 a month that I was allowed to spend on long distance phone calls. I paid the bill myself, but my mother could not understand wasting more than $13 (I think it was originally $10, and I negotiated up to $13) a month on calling BBSs. I kept a hand-written log of how many minutes I spent in each area code and the price to call that area code so that I would not go over.

The internet was invented several times. Many people assume that it wouldn't have happened without ARPAnet, but that doesn't line up with history. I remember the olden days :-) and anyone with two or more computers tried to hook them together by inventing a network.

It's like when the steam engine was invented (to pump water out of mines), one of the first things people tried was putting wheels on it. It's just obvious.

How goes it?