In article <9lvl7.82895$K6.33972144@news2>, william strutts wrote: > If I recall, Fidonet was a precursor to Usenet. No, Usenet really preceded FidoNet. The history of Usenet is longer than most current Usenet users realize. However, during the earlier days of Usenet, comparatively few people had access to it. This had advantages as well as disadvantages: the advantage was that Usenet was then almost completely free of spam, and the noise level was also very low compared to today. The disadvantage was that access was hard to get unless you already were part of some organisation (typically some university) with Usenet access. Fidonet was formed by people without Usenet access who wanted to be able to communicate globally electronically. > You would post messages on your local BBS and the messages would > be uploaded during the night and your responses from the previous > day would be downloaded. That is what I recall of such relay type > systems of the 80's. Fidonet is still alive and well. Check out e.g.: http://www.ftsc.org/ http://www.webring.org/cgi-bin/webring?ring=fidonet;list http://www.fidonews.org/ Interestingly the tables have now turned: some 10 years ago Fidonet news were full of noise while Usenet was fairly noise free. Today most of the noise makers have migrated to Usenet, and Fidonet is run by comparatively few enthusiasts -- and today Fidonet is more noise free than Usenet. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------- Paul Schlyter, Swedish Amateur Astronomer's Society (SAAF) Grev Turegatan 40, S-114 38 Stockholm, SWEDEN e-mail: pausch at saaf dot se or paul.schlyter at ausys dot se WWW: http://hotel04.ausys.se/pausch http://welcome.to/pausch