I remember dialing up to a local BBS that was a FidoNet node. The discussion forums/mailing lists had the same sense of urgency and intensity as today's Twitter hashtags or subreddits.<p>The amount of misinformation was about equal, too. I learned a lot of outright bullshit stated as fact reading those as a 12-year old. The difference is there's now zero limit to that nonsense being spread...
This was when a 14.4k modem was the last word in speed, and you were literally paying your phone company by the minute for a connection. Public access to Usenet required access through an ISP, who would also charge - separately - by the minute.<p>Modems were very optional, because not everyone had that kind of money.<p>At 14.4k it takes maybe 10 seconds to download a JPEG, and tens of minutes to hours to download a low-res video clip.<p>Neither Usenet nor Fidonet had anything like a browser. Files had to be converted to ASCII for upload, often in parts, and then glued back together and converted to the original format manually using various helper applications.<p>It was still exciting and fun though.
The article completely fails to mention that in Eastern Europe FidoNet existed and was popular well until mid-00's, and that a rather small community in Russia still exists to this day.
And yet none speak for punternet. Even wikipedia doesn't mention it here:<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Punter" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Punter</a><p>Yet, in the 300 baud days, before PC clones became numerous, when the C64 was the most sold PC on the planet, PunterBBS, and PunterNET was worldwide.<p>I ran such a BBS, on a C64 with two of these:<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_1571" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_1571</a><p>At the time, punternet offered everything fidonet did. But... time passes....
Some Chinese tech entrepreneurs were FidoNet users in 1990s, e.g.,Ma Huateng (Tecnent Founder & CEO), Ding Lei (NetEase Founder & CEO), Lei Jun (Xiaomi Founder & CEO)...
I remember using UUCP to link the half-dozen or so nodes of our little local net back 1991 (or thereabouts).<p>One of our members shared an excited piece of information: "Hey, wow! I just heard there's a whole million nodes on the Net."<p>The Net back then was Usenet, email, and (sometimes) ftp.<p>That new-fangled WWW thing was just a strange curiosity. It would never take off anyway, how would you know what websites were around? And anyway, hour-long long-distance phone calls were prohibitively expensive.
I hope this isn't off topic. I've been interested in perusing Usenet groups from the 80s like rec.music -- I swear ten years ago this was possible. I can't figure out how to do it now. Did the massive load of binaries kill off archival efforts? I can't find a search engine for Usenet anywhere. I'm just interested in plan text conversations.