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Comment by chrissnell | Hacker News Reader

The non-immediacy of messaging was one of the things I loved so much about FidoNet. A few times a day, your node (BBS) would dial into a hub server somewhere (sometimes over a long distance phone call) and download the mail bundle. The more messages you got, the longer it would take, so there was always some excitement when the bundle was large. You'd read your mail with care--after all, you might get 2-3 private messages a day--and responded with care. Normally, you'd just let your messages get delivered during the next daily mail call but if you had something important to send, you could initiate one manually. If you were sending internationally and didn't mind spending a little coin, it was fun to mark your message as "direct" and watch your node dial up the recipient's node across the pond or the world.

It was remarkable technology for the savvy home computer user in 1989.

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When I was 12 I was the hub for FidoNet mail in my smallish town. I was tweaking the settings before heading on vacation. We left the next morning, and returned a week later. We came home to an official notice from the police to contact them immediately. My parents did, and pretty soon 2 police officers showed up at our door.

They wanted to know who had been "hacking" from the second line in the house. It turns out I forgot to enter the area code for the FidoNet long distance number, and some poor souls had been getting a phone call at 3am with "strange noises", which auto-dialed every minute for 3 hours straight.

The police had disconnected the line, and I had to spend an hour explaining to the police officers what a BBS is, and what FidoNet is. I remember trying to draw a diagram, but it was in vain. In the end they just left confused, reconnected the line and I promised to be more careful in future.

I had a similar experience as a kid. We had a second phone line as my parents were both occasionally on call. Because they were just on call and the phone company charged extra, we didn't have the 'tone dialing' feature on the line. When they weren't on call, I was able to use that line for BBS's and Compuserve.

It turns out that at least for US-Robotics pulse dialing is not an exact science. The BBS I used most frequently was often busy so I would turn the modem volume down and just wait for it to eventually connect.

One day my parents got a call from the police who had gotten complaints of persistent prank phone calls late at night. I realized the problem and that I had to admit to staying up way past my bedtime online, I don't recall what the police threatened but I was definitely scared. I gave them a list of the top few BBS #s I called, and one of them was one digit off.

I got off pretty easy, I think I just paid for 'tone dialing' on that line going forward.

Tone dialing was such a crack-up. My grandmother refused to pay for it and it was always such a pain in the ass placing calls from her house. What was so funny is that the phone company had already transitioned to digital switches so somebody actually had to configure that line to intentionally not interpret the DTMF. If you didn't pay the $3 or whatever a month for tone service, they would have to create a burden for you.

That seems very nice of the police, both ways, Where and when was this?

It was nice of them, but I honestly think they just didn't know what to do. It was 1991 in Fort McMurray, Canada.

In 1989 I had to walk down to the lab to use a terminal to check my messages and this effectively limited my email checking to 1-2 days per week. Those ... might not have been the days actually. But there were some high points.

In the 1980s, I tried to send an email to someone outside IBM. It was hard enough sending to another employee. There was some massive rigmarole and in the end I think I gave up and write a letter.

I agree, FidoNet was a wonderful technology. My local BBS also had access to several newsgroups that were synced nightly. Between the two, I had plenty of material to keep my young mind busy. Perhaps too much material (some of the alt. newsgroups were probably not best for a ~9 year old :))

FidoNET was greatly efficient in a time of limited connectivity. I find I often schedule emails. Even wrote a plugin for my ticketing system that scheduled emails to maintain a sustainable flow of interactions with one client and not burying them in emails. Can't wait to it to be reinvented like slack brought out a modern IRC client. What would today's FidoNET look like if there was little to no internet available?

I miss those days of running a local point for my own mail. I enjoyed connecting with the local and remote communities - it was basically a form of one-to-one and group letter writing.

Although at one point a misconfigured node was calling my home number multiple times during the middle of the night. That part wasn't fun!.

My preference was UUCP for USENET via 1200 baud modem circa 1983.

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