Is it still somehow alive today? Is it archived anywhere?
Comments
FidoNet was a simply wonderful innovation, and it was a reflection of the creativity of its author - Tom Jennings - and his views of community and identity. https://grokipedia.com/page/tom_jennings
Tom was working on FidoNet in 1984, the same time my Iris co-founders and I had begun work on what became Lotus Notes. Architecturally, those of us who were working on collaborative systems in that era were shaped by the decentralized architecture of USEnet - inspired and motivated by the observation that a community could be brought together by something technologically as simple as uucp.
Both dial-up focused, Tom took this in the direction of a decentralized BBS, while I took it in the direction of masterless replicated nosql databases we called 'notefiles'. Identity being at the core, Tom was focused more on public community while we focused on private collaboration.
It was such an exciting time for emergent decentralization, shaped by a strong dose of 60's idealism.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21670035
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hackers_Conference
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Compute...
> Tom Jennings - and his views of community and identity. https://grokipedia.com/page/tom_jennings
Human version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Jennings
By thatxliner 2026-03-1013:181 reply [flagged]
Possible.
Their HN profile claims they’re Ray Ozzie, which I find hard to believe.
Their account that has been posting for over 15 years and has made numerous comments with real insight into the times under discussion? I know it's necessary to have a healthy bit of skepticism when being on the Internet but I think we could agree this is one of the weirdest, longest, dumbest cons in the history of confidence games if this is not Ray Ozzie.
HN has a fairly wide group of "famous" contributors like Woz, etc.
By andsoitis 2026-03-1013:51 Right, which is why my first instinct was to write “possible”.
If it is you, Ray: I thought your creations Lotus Notes and Groove were phenomenal!!
By tclancy 2026-03-110:42 I might be thinking of Metafilter, where he commented for a while. Could have sworn he commented on something here.
Sure looks legit based on the linked Keybase, Twitter, and GitHub.
By whalesalad 2026-03-1016:491 reply A bot can't have a keybase, twitter, and github account?
By Cyphase 2026-03-1017:41 I didn't say because those accounts exist, I said based on them.
By cykros 2026-03-1012:48 Last I checked it was still quite alive with quite a few BBS systems, though admittedly that was a few years ago.
Looks like you can still hook up to it using a Synchronet BBS anyway using the steps available here: https://wiki.synchro.net/howto:fidonet
The homepage for FIDONet itself is here: https://www.fidonet.org/
And the Zone 1 Hub, Dark Realms (a Renegade BBS since 1994) is here: https://www.darkrealms.ca/ It has node lists available if you're looking for systems to connect from.
By jlarcombe 2026-03-1011:55 FidoNet was great fun. Despite finding it difficult to remember any useful numbers in my life (credit card, NI etc) I can still remember my FidoNet addresses from when I was a youngster.
I'm not sure how I'd feel about an archive though, I'm sure I wrote a lot of childish nonsense on it! like a lot of things, perhaps best left as a happy memory...
