Nodes and Points: Who Got an Address

FidoNet's address structure looked like this: Zone:Net/Node.Point Each piece meant something specific. Each piece corresponded to a real machine somewhere, owned by a real person. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Node ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── A node was a BBS. A full member of FidoNet. It had an official address handed out by a Net Coordinator. It participated in Zone Mail Hour. It was listed in the nodelist, a single text file that everyone on FidoNet downloaded weekly. To run a node you needed: ▓▓ A dedicated phone line (or at least one you could leave plugged into the modem during ZMH). ▓▓ A computer that ran 24/7. Usually a 386 or 486 in the basement. ▓▓ Mailer software: BinkleyTerm, FrontDoor, T-Mail, InterMail. ▓▓ Tosser software: tossed incoming mail packets into the right echo conferences. FastEcho, Squish, Crashmail. ▓▓ A message editor for SysOps and users: GoldEd, Msgedit. ▓▓ The patience of a saint. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Point ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── A point was a user. Not a BBS. A person with point software on their home PC who had registered with a node and got assigned a sub-address. Points couldn't accept calls from random people. They polled their boss node on a schedule to pick up mail addressed to them. Point software was lighter than full BBS software. The most popular was CrossPoint on DOS, especially in the German-speaking FidoNet where it had around 25,000 users at its peak. A point could read echomail offline, write replies, and upload them all at once during a single short call to the boss node. This was the original asynchronous email pattern, ten years before normal people had email. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Hub ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── A hub was a node that volunteered to aggregate traffic for several other nodes downstream. Smaller nodes called the hub. The hub called upstream. Less long-distance for everyone. Hubs were the unsung heroes of FidoNet. Running a hub meant your phone bill became somebody else's problem to be grateful for. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Why this matters ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── The whole structure was peer-to-peer routing done by hand, by hobbyists, with no central authority. People volunteered to be hubs. Coordinators handed out numbers. The nodelist was maintained collaboratively. No one got paid. The network just worked. There is a lesson in there about decentralized networks that the Web 3 crowd keeps trying to rediscover. --- END OF MESSAGE ---