antipopper

Just the other night I was telling some colleagues about my early online experiences — sending emails as a pre-teen in the early 80s, BBSes, my old 300-baud acoustic coupler, being able to type faster than my modem’s upload speed (and people have the hide to moan about broadband!)… And today I discover that Tom Jennings, creator of the FidoNet BBS network that I used as a kid, was also a queer anarchist punk zinester, and now does critical retro tech art. How fucking cool is that?

FidoNet enabled discrete, private bulletin board systems, run by hobbyists in the suburbs, to hook up across the world in order to exchange private emails and public conference messages — an “Internet for the rest of us”, back when the Net was the domain of university labs and big IT businesses. FidoNet was the largest computer network made out of privately run nodes in the world. (Howard Rheingold briefly mentions FidoNet in The Virtual Community.)

Back in the 80s I had my own FidoNet fantasy project: to replace the monolithic FidoNet BBS software with a modular, open source “operating system” for networked messaging that used the same protocols as FidoNet nodes. It would involve hordes of volunteers working in different cities, taking responsibility for different parts of the system. We’d establish common, standard interfaces for the software objects to be able to work together. We’d actually use the medium of FidoNet to facilitate the making of the product. Like the proprietary FidoNet software, it would be free to download, but unlike FidoNet, its source code would be freely available for people to modify. Our business model: selling shrink-wrapped distributions of the software, and selling technical support. I managed to get some actual programmers interested, but the project kinda collapsed when I realised how big it’d have to be, and that in many ways, we’d might as well be recreating Unix. (A few years later, Linus Torvalds created Linux, an open source version of Unix that was made by volunteers from around the world, using the Internet to facilitate its maintenance, and spawning a whole industry of selling distributions and support for free software. Harrumph. I look back now and wished that I’d actually learned to program properly.)