I'm not sure how I'd feel about an archive though, I'm sure I wrote a lot of childish nonsense on it! like a lot of things, perhaps best left as a happy memory...
But usenetarchives has had some enshittification happen.
This one still has some of the more fun files: http://textfiles.com/bbs/FIDONET/
There is also a Giganews dump on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/giganews And this one: https://archive.org/details/usenet-fido
Google stopped being useful for usenet a while ago but still has some if you can find it.
There was a time we were encouraged to be friendly with Russia, and many Russian devs were on Fidonet. This was actually how some I knew were recruited to work for western companies.
We've spent so many nights with my friend (15 yo in 1996, the peak FidoNet) connecting to BBSes over phone modem, soaking up all the Fido lore, humour and lingo, dreaming of obtaining us a .point for ourselves somehow. To that end, we visited a number of local "sysopkas" and "pointovkas" (sysop/point parties), making friends with actual point owners who gathered in a local park to booze some and have fun.
What a blessed time it was! The future seemed spotless and bright...
https://www.wired.com/1994/08/hacker-crackdown-italian-style...
Boy, I suspected it might have been before my time, but not that much!
Feels like most modern platforms traded that for scale.
Looks like you can still hook up to it using a Synchronet BBS anyway using the steps available here: https://wiki.synchro.net/howto:fidonet
The homepage for FIDONet itself is here: https://www.fidonet.org/
And the Zone 1 Hub, Dark Realms (a Renegade BBS since 1994) is here: https://www.darkrealms.ca/ It has node lists available if you're looking for systems to connect from.
I was born too late and missed most of the fun, but still managed to catch the trailing end of fidonet in the late 2000s. Pretty much everything was over IP already, there wasn't a single proper dial-up node in my local network (which was pretty small already, around 20 nodes in its heyday), but for me this IP connection happened to be a pay-by-the-minute dialup ISP, so the offline nature of fidonet helped me stay glued to the computer and actively participate in dozens of communities with just a few expensive online minutes per day. Later (in highschool) I ran my own dialup node just for fun on an old PII with NT4 in a cardboard box under my bed. It survived multiple hardware and geographical moves and was running over IP up to about 2012-ish, and was finally nuked from the nodelist in 2018. I still have all the configs in the backups somewhere and the active NCs contact, so technically could get it back up if really wanted to. Too bad there's nobody there to speak to.
Exchanging messages with people on the other side of the world felt like magic at the time (even though it took many hours/days for a msg to round-trip)
I also run "Sudaka's BBS" based on Maximus/2, with many interactive "apps" I'd developed using Maximus' proprietary C-like language. Great high-school times.
I can still hear my parents complaining about my monopolizing the phone line every night :-)
It wasn't until later that clones existed and became popular, and then FidoNet dwarfed PunterNet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64
It has been listed in the Guinness World Records as the best-selling desktop computer model of all time.
I used to run a board. Was beyond fun.
* https://en.everybodywiki.com/Blue_Wave_(mail_reader)
As well as the QWK and SOUP file formats (the latter when I started on Usenet as well):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_(file_format)
* https://web.archive.org/web/20080509070947/http://combee.tec...
And Tradewars 2002 'door game':
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Wars
* https://breakintochat.com/wiki/TradeWars_2002
* https://breakintochat.com/wiki/BBS_door_game
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door_(bulletin_board_system)
BinkleyTerm was another favorite of mine, but I'm not sure of this version's lineage: https://sourceforge.net/p/btxe/code/
Tom was working on FidoNet in 1984, the same time my Iris co-founders and I had begun work on what became Lotus Notes. Architecturally, those of us who were working on collaborative systems in that era were shaped by the decentralized architecture of USEnet - inspired and motivated by the observation that a community could be brought together by something technologically as simple as uucp.
Both dial-up focused, Tom took this in the direction of a decentralized BBS, while I took it in the direction of masterless replicated nosql databases we called 'notefiles'. Identity being at the core, Tom was focused more on public community while we focused on private collaboration.
It was such an exciting time for emergent decentralization, shaped by a strong dose of 60's idealism.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21670035
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hackers_Conference
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Compute...
Human version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Jennings
Their HN profile claims they’re Ray Ozzie, which I find hard to believe.
HN has a fairly wide group of "famous" contributors like Woz, etc.
If it is you, Ray: I thought your creations Lotus Notes and Groove were phenomenal!!
orf•2h ago
https://www.google.com/search?q=is+fidonet+archived+anywhere