In our country, it was the only way to communicate. The internet wasn’t accessible yet and it was expensive.
FidoNet was all about people who know each other in real life! That was the biggest advantage compared to the internet. And it was free to use! With only one simple fee when joining.
If you wanted to have your own access to FidoNet, you had to buy beer for a guy who owned special software — a sysop. He or she not only owned the software, but most importantly had a telephone line attached to it.
In our case, the sysop had it at home.
His node (software + telephone line) wasn’t accessible 24/7. So, as a FidoNet user, you could call that line at speficif time (usually in the evening or night). (using client software and a modem, not by voice). On any other time, his mom was trying to speak while hearing your modem noises. Anyone could be a sysop if you had a computer, a telephone line, and basic skills to set the software up. Many sysops were hobbyists who used their own computers to run it at home.
When you called and got LUCKY, the line would be free and not occupied by another user. Then, your software would communicate with his software to exchange data. During that process, you’d see all the statuses, how many megabytes of data you needed to send and receive, including progress bars or something like that.
Sometimes your family member might pick up the phone in another room, hear the shhhhh noise, and start swearing because the telephone line was busy. This would cut off the data exchange process. After that, you’d need to call again, hoping the line was free. Most of the time it wasn’t, so you had to call again on auto-repeat.
The data could be personal messages or direct messages (Netmail), similar to modern emails. You could send a message to someone directly. No media — no sound, pictures, or videos. Files — yes.
By being part of one node, you could write to any other node user. Just like an iCloud email owner can write to an Outlook email owner. If the node owner lived physically closer to you, the message would be delivered faster. It wasn’t as fast as modern internet data exchange, but back when everything was slow (including your computer), it was ok. At least you had a connection to the world!! For free!!
Another type of data was echomails — very similar to modern forums. There were different types of echoes, like subreddits. So you could subscribe to one or another. After that, you could read or write them. And if you subscribed to many of them, it just took more time to sync when you called your node.
I don’t remember if you could attach files to “forums” (nodes), but I do remember that you could attach them to direct messages. It usually wasn’t practical, because each file extended the synchronization process.
All the data was downloaded to your computer during the sync call. After that, the connection dropped, and you could read it offline. So if you wanted to send a message to someone or to a forum, you needed to write that message (with all the respect to the rules) and then remember to sync with your sysop later. If his line was busy that day, you’d need to try again another day.
Speaking of rules, I remember one — if you were answering someone’s message, you had to erase all the non-relevant quotes from their text. The reason for that, I think, was to reduce the amount of data to exchange and also to make all the messages readable. There wasn’t a system that could hide quotes (like in modern mail clients).
Our software ran on DOS. Here’s how it looked when you were writing to someone:
Echoes/Forums:
Sometimes a sysop would invite node users to gather in real life, hang out, drink beer, and have a good time.
Just like other communities, FidoNet had its own language and jokes. So if you met young FidoNet users on the street, you might not understand what they were talking about. Their terms/words were unique to the FidoNet community. Note that most of the time, FidoNet users were programmers mostly, so the community had a small amount of people who could not be called “noobs” in technologies, computers, and coding. After switching from FidoNet to the internet, I immediately noticed that difference. FidoNet was a network for friends, for people who were mostly the same as you — actively interested in learning, exchange, coding, etc.
When your sysop’s line was busy, or you were bored, you could call by modem to a BBS. It was some kind of server with its own stuff: news, articles, files, games, and chats. Similar to modern websites, I guess. You can experience it even today if you search for how to use a BBS with Telnet. But that’s another story.
The internet replaced FidoNet. That era is over. Old FidoNet users didn’t respect the internet at first, and as I mentioned before, it’s understandable. We lost the community, the friendship, free access and the filters on who could join. But today, all of them use the internet, and most of the FidoNet nodes are closed or closing each year.
I personally miss that network. It had many advantages, and it was free to use! At some point, I thought Mastodon was something similar, but after using it, I didn’t get the same feeling as FidoNet.
