There was a FidoNet clone in Turkey called HitNet (short for “Hi Türkiye Net”). Its node addresses were like “8:103/119”.
İ developed a Netmail server for Hitnet called HitBase in 1995 or so. It allowed people to discover others around their city to meet. Possibly the earliest thing that resembles Facebook. Similarly, it was a privacy nightmare too, luckily short-lived.
HitNet introduced me to great people some of whom I still see today. It was such a tight-knit friendly community.
The advent of Internet killed it but some communities are still active on other platforms.
Respected the process for getting on Fidonet. You had to figure it out, configure it properly and prove you were ready to go before you got a node number. No hand holding. Frontdoor and national mail hour.
Even if you were a "point" (an endpoint assigned to the node) you still had to set up the software and (in the mid-to-late 90s at least) set up a modem to call your node to upload/download. And sometimes you had to set up repeated dialing until you got through because the node could be busy (some nodes doubled as BBSs), or connection could be bad and it'd had to retry etc. Wasn't an easy task, so it served as a sort of a filter so that most people on there were geeks.
Later on of course some nodes started distributing over the Internet so setting up a node became much easier (and I think there was a way for the node to allow multiple users read/write without even setting up a node/point at all).
I loved that era. I was a BBSer from about 1988 through 1994 or so, on several systems with FidoNet and RelayNet / RIME. I also ran my own BBS for a while, eventually it had some Usenet newsgroups and Internet email through UUCP (anyone remember bang paths?)
What I miss most is the local community aspect. In my teens and early 20's I met several friends through BBSes.
İ developed a Netmail server for Hitnet called HitBase in 1995 or so. It allowed people to discover others around their city to meet. Possibly the earliest thing that resembles Facebook. Similarly, it was a privacy nightmare too, luckily short-lived.
HitNet introduced me to great people some of whom I still see today. It was such a tight-knit friendly community.
The advent of Internet killed it but some communities are still active on other platforms.
Later on of course some nodes started distributing over the Internet so setting up a node became much easier (and I think there was a way for the node to allow multiple users read/write without even setting up a node/point at all).
Whenever I hear about this new fangled AT protocol all the kids are jazzed about, I get all wistful for the BBS era.
FidoNet & PC-Relay were pretty fanfastic. For the time, obv.
Source: Was sysadmin for a hub.
What I miss most is the local community aspect. In my teens and early 20's I met several friends through BBSes.
[1] https://archive.org/details/20021102-bbs-herring/Mark+Herrin...