Post AzY0csvio4OSXryxeK by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
(DIR) More posts by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
(DIR) Post #AzWFZBy1CB4VQRpki8 by profoundlynerdy@bitbang.social
2025-10-23T01:26:02Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
I know there are big archives of historical Usenet posts online. Are there similar Echonet archives from Fidonet?#usenet #fidonet #retrocomputing #sysadmin #bbs
(DIR) Post #AzWcfBivJMtdLzbLUW by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-10-24T06:04:54Z
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@profoundlynerdy I do not know but suspect not. Usenet ran on corporate, university, and mil machines, institutions with resources. FidoNet was hobbiests only. But estimates of 500k people used it so you'd think there would be at least fragmented copies. Those people will be in their 50s to 80s now....
(DIR) Post #AzXrutQyluANjZ7BBI by profoundlynerdy@bitbang.social
2025-10-24T20:30:29Z
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@tomjennings Add to that, their data is/was archived on some very old media, such as floppy disks and zip drives that can be difficult to recover data from in the modern age.
(DIR) Post #AzY0csvio4OSXryxeK by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-10-24T22:08:05Z
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@profoundlynerdy Yup. And it all took place in a culture that values money over all, including institutions, which are rarely interested in things that do not accrue value to themselves. At least here in the US. Lol I worked very hard to ensure FidoNet was never monetized. There were explicit legal attempts to do so! We'd formed an organization, IFNA, to organize nodelist production, tech standards publication, lol we did a bad job, there was a vote to turn it commercial and I had to go up on the podium and blurt out some shit and ruin the party. In hindsight an option might have been to simply fork it, but that was literally not on the agenda. I'll never trust some of those fuckers, and I know they hate me to this day. Lol for me some of them ended up suing each other over tech they stolen from each other. I assume that ill are now all trumpers.