FidoNet came together literally in one instant -- after months or
years of accumulated thoughts and ideas, many or most other
peoples'.

Unless you use one of these damn things regularly, it's hard to
understand, not because anyone is stupid, but because there's a
number of assumptions that you have to make or understand before
you get what ``network'' really means. 

A ``network'' is what you and all your friends are -- even before
it became New-Agey to say so. You're all interconnected, in the
sense that ``messages'' or whatever from one person to another,
get delivered or heard. Usually, you simply talk to them, in
person or on the phone. Less important news, who's doing what
these days, etc, just sorta filters around, until everyone
(usually) hears about it. People sometimes add, subtract, or
modify information, or simply tell fun stories.

Well -- the ``network'' part is the {\it how}, the connections.
It's usually indulgent to talk about informal human networks. But
for computers, they are so stupid you have to lead them to water,
and tell them where their mouths are. And to put water in it.

OK, so what does a computer ``network''? Why, whatever you tell
them to, of course.

I will not attempt to explain to you how a computer stores text.
You've seen it done, and if you haven't, you'll simply have to
take it on faith. In one sentence: each graphical symbol (letter,
puctuation marks, etc) are encoded numerically, and the computer
stores {\it that}. OK, so now you know you can store ``text''.

The trick to a computer network -- interconnected computers with
the ability to do with ``text'' what you do with your personal
messages (lose them, pretend you didn't hear, tell the wrong
person, etc) is to somehow wire the machines together. Computers
are electrical devices, and so they need wires to connect them
together. (Keep comments about radio etc to yourself.)

Stringing wires to and from every computer you might want to
``network'' to is obviously not practical. But, there just so
happens (probably\dots) to be a wire in your house that {\it
does} run to everyone elses house -- the telephone system.

To cut short a hundred years of boring technological development
-- there's a thing that, you put electrical signals into one end,
and it makes sound signals out the other end, so that it can
essentially talk in rigid mathemetical tones. It can listen to
this crap too. ``Talk'' here means simply transcribe, computer
says ``1'', device talks ``high tone''\dots device hears ``high
tone'', and talks ``1''. The thing is called a modem. You buy
them in a store for \$75 or more.

So what you do is get one for every computer. One end connects to
the computer, the other to the telephone line. Your second
telephone line, dedicated to this thing, because I can tell you
you don't want to share the phone with a machine this stupid.

What happens when you do this? Absolutely nothing.

YOu can stare at, threaten and bang upon your computer all day
long, but it still ain't gonna let you write a letter until you
run the word processor program. What if it was 1971, and there
were no word processor programs? You'd be shit out of luck,
that's what!

And this brings us back to the present dwelling upon the past --
FidoNet. There were ``computer networks'' at the time I wrote
FidoNet, but none that a mere mortal could have. (And I was told
in no uncertain terms that it was (variously) impossible to do on
a personal computer, or already done, why bother.)

Digression once again. 

About 1979 or so I had a decent (for the time) CP/M computer, for
it's time the equivelant to a PC clone 286. I could run most any
commercial program, and I wrote my own. I bought what was a bit
of exotica from a surplus store -- an accoustic modem, which is a
modem that literally made screaming tones, with what looked like
ear muffs into which you jammed the telephone handset after
dialing what you hoped was a computer on the other end. I used a
barbaric program that simply sent every keyboard character to the
modem, and took whatever data appeared form the modem, to the
local console screen. Lo, you could type to and from the remote
computer.

What the remote computer ran was a program called a Bulletin
Board System, or BBS, which were invented by Ward Christensen and
Randy Suess, in Chicago, in 1977 or so. It was simply another
decent-sized computer, with a slightly more sophisticated modem
that could tell when the phone was ringing, and answer it
automatically (it connected directly to the phone wires, instead
of my primitive ear muffs).

What was unique was that Ward'n'Randy had written a program that
emulated the social structure (if you will) of a supermarket
bulletin board. There were about 200 slots for text messages.
After calling in, you could post messages (type them in by hand),
read existing messages (after specifying which one, by number),
and you could do things that you couldn't do on a supermarket
bulletin board -- concepts like the ``next'' or ``previous''
message (the one posted after or before the one you just read),
search for a word within messages, and so on. (These additional
things or functions are called ``features'' and like in a movie
theatre, patrons (users) sit and wait to see what's next. It can
lead to a disease peculiar to computer programmers called
``creeping featuritis''.)

Ever listen to ham radio? Boooring. Unless you are into it -- in
which case drawn out detailed conversations on antenna
particulars, including number of elements, where bought, 
bad-weather and bird-shit tall tales, so'n'so's fell down, how
those screws you sold me got rusty, and so on are excruciatingly
interesting.

Which they were to me, and a fe thousand others, at that time.
Mainly it was programmers talking about programmer junk. I can't
recall a single thing.

In Boston in 1980 there were maybe a dozen? BBS's total. There
were two I called regularly; NECS, the New England COmputer
Society BBS (I was a member for a while) and the cnode, based
upon a software system I never really did understand very well,
run by a totally cool guy whose name escapes my now, in Andover
MA. ANyways, (I am getting back to FidoNet here, hold on) on the
cnode someone proposed a ``east coast -- west coast computer
network'', with the incomplete idea of interconnecting a zillion
computers, enough so that there'd be one in every local-dialing
area, so you could get a message from one computer to another by
hopping across each local-call area. Ugh. A mind-boggling
prospect.\footnote*{And ten years later, it has almost happened
-- the FidoNet has gotten so dense in the Eastern metrosprawl
that most mail I think from DE to DC to NJ is sent this way. It
is alleged to involve incomprehensibly complex routing.}

So I read that, along with many other people, and many other
messages on many other subjects. I never forgot it though. And I
never remembered the author, who persisted in his folly for quite
some time. (Silly person.)

I worked for Phoenix Software, for Neil
Colvin\footnote\dag{Though we frequently got on each others'
nerves, Neil is probably the best person I've ever worked for,
and the most honest and least cheapskate, and occasionally
downright generous. Once for no reason other than they were
totally cool, he bought a half-dozen of the then-extreme-tech 
HP-16C programmers calculators, just to give to his employees.
Now that's hardcore techie! And I still absolutely relish mine;
nine years later, I positively love using it, unlike {\it any}
other techie tool I have.}, at home, on my Multibuss-based
computer I got for implementing CP/M on it for the manufacturer
(Comark Inc). Since we all worked at home, 40 miles or more
apart, delivering programs and such was a drag; or worse, after
driving from West Medford to North Easton, finding out I forgot
some damn file or other. So we had modems (by this time almost
useful; Hayes Smartmodem 1200's, direct-connect no more ear
muffs), and the same barbaric software, and we would call each
other up and say ``OK, I have the program for you. Hang up, and
the next call will be my modem calling'' then I would issue the
appropriate dial commands to my modem, and Neil would wait for
the phone to ring, then command his modem to answer the phone,
and if we were lucky (someone else didn't call, all 10,000 of the
critical parameters were set properly, etc) you got the {\tt
CONNECT 1200} message on your screen. You could then proceed to
type at each other (about as useful as calling on the telephone,
then putting a rag over your your mouth, and mumbling) and then,
the magic: transmitting a program or text file from one computer
to another. (I'm skipping the arcane history and development of
what is known as ``file transfer protocols'', or 
``error-correcting protocols'', how the computers actually
transmit computer files from one computer to another, phone lines
or not. Explaining them now would only make things worse.)

It was better than driving back the 40 or so miles, to say the
least, even though the whole thing just sucked. Never mind the
phone bills.

Right before I moved to San Francisco, December `83, I even had a
simple program that would make my modem answer the phone, make me
enter a password, and if I got it right, I could operate my
computer remotely! 

January 1984 was when the telephone company ``break-up'' (sic)
was to happen, and I took advantage of it to get a free modem
from Ma Bell. I was having trouble to get any modem to work at
high speed over my phone line. The same modems would work on any
other line, but not mine. It was obviously the phone line, but
just try to convince the telco about that. They said, and
rightly, that they only guarenteed voice quality, and it sounded
fine. So, I ordered an AT\&T modem, and had {\it them} install
it, knowing it would fail too. And it did. When the repair guy
would come over, he would shit bricks when he saw the AT\&T
modem. The third repair guy was cool though, and interested in
modems and such. So he order a frequency-spectrum analysis done,
and found a ``bad spot'' that suppressed certain frequencies. But
nope, there was nothing they could do about it.

So when I moved I swiped it. I refused to pay the bill (\$250
installation, \$40/month, in 1984!) since it never worked, and
called from SF to disconnect my service. ``And where is the
equipment?'' the telco drone asks. ``Right here'' said I. But
then, it was New England Bell who installed AT\&T equipment, and
they were trapped in bureaucratic deadlock, because they ewre now
all ``separate''! . I never heard from them again.

So I'm in San Francisco, and I have an extra computer (an Otrona
Attach\'e 8:16), and now, an extra modem. I've got all this
techie files'n'stuff, and not much to do. BBS technology had of
course expanded


