How the Mac was born... supposedly...

From: Bill Sheehan <sheehan_at_sheehan.tzo.com>
Date: Thu Jan 13 10:39:40 2005

FidoNet sysops paranoid? Which one of our enemies told you that?

-- Bill (WithoutaNet sysop, 1:101/230)



On Jan 12, 2005, at 5:36 PM, Tom Jennings wrote:

> On Wed, 12 Jan 2005, Al Kossow wrote:
>
>> In the unix world, uucp and netnews, both using bang separated
>> pathnames. Tom could explain the details of FIDOnet, which had
>> gateways. Then there were all the other corparate/educational
>> nets with their own naming rules (bitnet,decnet and dec's internal
>> networks). Most people had slow point-point links at the periphery.
>
> In FidoNet, every node (host) in the net has a complete map of the
> network. The first pass was a simple "host" file ala /etc/hosts,
> but it ended up a distributed/assembled reasonably smart symbolic
> thing. It never fully did what I thought it ought to -- use the
> echomail mechanism to redundantly distribute nodelist fragments
> from which your system would assemble on the pieces you needed.
>
> (Echomail was a multiply-redundant, self-healing,
> amorphously-connected database system used to deliver "echo" mail,
> the functional equivelant of USENET. It was developed by Jeff Rush
> ("The Shadow", Dallas TX) not me. It used FidoNet (FSC001) as a
> transport mechanism. Echomail is a spectacularly wonderful
> mechanism. There was even a robust voting system developed using
> it, and people don't come in flavors more paranoid than FidoNet
> sysops; if it pleased them it's gotta be good.)
Received on Thu Jan 13 2005 - 10:39:40 GMT