EchoMail: Distributed Forums Over Modem

If you think a global threaded forum that runs on volunteer-operated nodes with no central server is a recent idea, let me tell you about EchoMail. EchoMail was FidoNet's distributed conference system. Each conference was called an echo, because messages echoed from one BBS to the next. You posted a message on your local BBS. Overnight your BBS handed the message to its uplink. The uplink handed it to its uplinks. By the following morning, your message had hopped across the world. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── How an echo worked ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Each echo had a moderator who set the rules and resolved disputes. Each echo had a tag like: DOORS.GAMES Discussion of BBS door games PROGRAMMING.C C language Q and A R20_FOR_SALE For-sale ads in FidoNet Region 20 SCIENCE Hard science discussion CHATTER General BBS chatter Subscribing to an echo meant requesting it from your uplink. The uplink would mark your node as a downstream subscriber. Future messages in that echo would flow to you. Reply in the echo, and your reply flowed back upstream and out to everyone else. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Tossing and scanning ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Mail came in as compressed packet files (.PKT inside .ZIP). A piece of software called a tosser unpacked the packet, figured out which echoes the messages belonged to, and wrote them into the appropriate message base. Popular tossers: FastEcho, Squish, Crashmail, GEcho. Reading was done in a reader or directly in the BBS message viewer. Writing was done in the same viewer. The cycle ran every night. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── The famous echoes ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Some echoes became legendary. C_ECHO and PASCAL were graveyards of language wars. BBS_CARNIVAL was general BBS chatter. DEBATE existed for the explicit purpose of having arguments in one place so other echoes could stay civil. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Compared to USENET ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── USENET did the same thing, originally over UUCP and later via NNTP, with a more permissive flood-fill propagation. EchoMail did it over modems, with a stricter star-and-hub topology and a moderator system that actually meant something. You could read both. Many people did. They felt different. EchoMail was slower and smaller and closer. --- END OF MESSAGE ---