Archives of old Fidonet messages?
reddit / bbs

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Kirkman14 · 2014-01-02 00:07

I know about http://fidonet.ozzmosis.com, but it seems to go back only
to 2002.

And I know some BBSes have a lot of old Fidonet messages. Exec-PC, for
example, seems to have many messages from 1998-99.

Anybody have suggestions of other websites or BBSes that have vintage
Fidonet echo mail archives?

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ILikeBumblebees · 2014-01-02 04:53

[This domain](http://www.filegate.net:8080/bbbs) seems to be the
destination of the "archives" link on the official [FidoNet Zone
1](http://www.z1.fidonet.org/) website, but I haven't been able to
successfully register an account there.  If you can, it might be a
good place to start.

There are also what appear to be up-to-date Fido nodelists
[here](http://www.filegate.net/nodelist/); despite the extensions, the
files are just zipped plaintext with comma-separated records, and they
almost all seem to have telnet addresses.

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Kirkman14 · 2014-01-02 19:20

Cool, thanks for that link. I gave it a shot and was able to create an
account.

It works well, but the archives don't seem to reach back much further
than the Ozzmosis site. I looked at 4 or 5 echoes, and the oldest
messages I found were from 2001.

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ILikeBumblebees · 2014-01-02 22:36

I wonder if an archive could be cobbled together out of messages
collected from the files of old BBSes, including the ones still
accessible on those nodelists.

Might be a pretty big project, but I bet there's a lot of data out
there, and if enough people worked on dredging it up, it could be a
successful endeavor.  Maybe it would help to involve someone like
Jason Scott.