What killed Fido

It was a time of romantic programming of intrusions in asm, mod, stm, s3m players in pascal+asm, etc. In Fido there were the same (mostly) IT specialists convinced of the correctness of their choice of profession.

Sending a letter to Vladivostok from Krasnodar back then made you think, will it get there, no? And in how many months? And the Internet was SUCH a rarity that the word email was simply something foreign. And in FIDO there were, as they would say now, volunteers who were ready to receive a message by e-mail (not email, FIDO) with a request to forward its paper copy to the specified address, they did it! Selflessly! They simply printed it out and took it to the post office!

I'm afraid that time will never return. Nowadays, no one would even blink an eye at free. And FIDO was a free network. Yes, yes, young people, absolutely free! Because the telephone line installed in the apartment was not limited per minute (until a certain time), and long-distance mail was sent by enthusiasts like me, who had “free long-distance” at work.

Now for the old-schoolers. 🙂 Everyone remembers the Front Door + Fast Echo + GoldED bundle? And the batch files to make it all work together? 🙂 But in 2002 (approximately) the FIPS software product appeared. It was good! It replaced this whole bundle. It allowed any clumsy person to connect to FIDO. This is what killed FIDO.

Yes, by this time we (sysops) had mostly switched to IP, replaced DOS Front Door with Argus, but the advent of FIPS let non-IT people into OUR network. And it began… Everything you see on the Internet now. 🙁

“Don't let your children on the Internet, they make the Internet dumber.”

—

Sincerely,

2:5063/10