How BBSes Actually Exchanged Messages

The romantic version: messages flowed across the world overnight. The actual version: a SysOp's modem dialed another SysOp's modem, two computers handshook for ten seconds, transferred a few hundred kilobytes of compressed packets, and hung up. Then the next pair did the same thing. Eight thousand of these handshakes happened every night, somewhere on Earth. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── The choreography ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── A typical mail exchange looked like this: 1. Local BBS finishes processing the day's user messages. Tosser packs them into .PKT files, one per echo or per destination node. 2. Packer compresses the .PKT files into a .ZIP or .ARJ archive. Compression mattered. Phone bills were measured per minute. 3. Mailer software (BinkleyTerm, Front Door, T-Mail) sits at the modem waiting for ZMH or for an outbound call slot. 4. At 09:00 UTC, the local node calls its hub. The hub answers with a FTS-0001 handshake. 5. They negotiate which packets to exchange, swap them in both directions using ZMODEM, and hang up. 6. The unpacker decompresses incoming packets. The tosser routes incoming messages into echoes and NetMail. 7. Users call in the next morning, see new messages. The whole loop ran every twenty-four hours. Bigger nodes ran it every few hours. Hubs ran it constantly. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Modem speeds ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Speed mattered. Phone time was money. The progression looked like this: 1984: 300 baud. Bell 103. A page of text took a minute. Most early FidoNet ran on these. 1985: 1200/2400 baud. Hayes Smartmodem 2400. Text was readable in real time. The real start of FidoNet's growth. 1989: 9600 baud. V.32. Real graphics could transfer in reasonable time. 1992: 14.4k. V.32bis. With V.42bis compression on top, big files became practical. Door games had backgrounds. 1996: 28.8k / 33.6k. V.34. The peak of FidoNet. 1998: 56k. V.90. By now most users were leaving BBSes for the web. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── The phone bill ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Hub SysOps in 1992 routinely paid $300 to $1500 per month in long-distance charges to keep their hub running. They were not reimbursed. They did it because they liked it. That was the whole business model of FidoNet. If you ever wonder why pre-internet community was different from post-internet community: people paid for it themselves. --- END OF MESSAGE ---