The History of Fidonet an Interview with Tom Jennings October 1993 tape 1 side A and I had managed to steal a modem from the phone company by taking advantage of the breakup so called which is a long story in itself. But I had a bell AT&T 212A-something modem, a big clunky thing with a multikey phone attached and so I thought I know, I'll write a bulletin board. so my first attempt at a bulletin board was horrible. It sorta looked like Dos, dos Version 1.25 at the time. And then after a couple of abortive attempts I realized that this was stupid. I'll just not remake it, I'll take a good look at cbbs the CP/M-80 based board at the time that was the only thing really worth a shit. RBBS which was just starting to become available then and it might have been around for a bit maybe a year. It was written in basic on an IBM pc. Marge uhu Tom I did not have an ibm pc and basic I will not do anything in basic except write printer tests or something. So I wrote what became Fido in C starting November 83. It was probably operationable about the begining of the year. The begining of 84. Marge Do you still have a copy of that software available? Tom Ah no Marge Shucks I would like to play with it. Tom I would too actually. I'm curious as to what [they look like now], but I do have versions 5 and 6, and versions 1 through 6 all came out in the first year. And they look amazingly similiar. There's just not that much difference. Some commands are added. You can guess which ones. Verson 1... well really I don't know what the first version was. It probbly wasn't a one. But they were remarkably similiar. The first usable one only had one message area and one file area. And everything else was added later. multiple areas. Marge uhu So when did you get the bright idea of getting two of them to talk to each other? Tom Well it had been an idea kicking around for some time. Since the late 70s in what's now the PC world. But that was something else. There was a system in Andover Mass run by Wayne something? Andover CNODE it was a CP/M-80 (Zilog Z80) machine he had a whole bunch of harddisks and a lot of programs to download. and about 8 logical drives like from A: to H: or something. He had a MINICBBS BBS (stripped-down version of CBBS... utterly minimal) that he would run as a separate program from it. Some user of his system had this idea about what if we had bulletin boards that just hopped a message across the country by going local call to local call to local call. And while it was an intriguing idea, when you stop to think about it mindboggling and ridiculous. But it got some tiny amount of message traffic and of course we put it away like all ideas like that, but it kinda stuck with me even though by this time Fido was basicly... my fido board was rather busy. I was running a technical board a technical C programmers board... Marge What was the name of your first board? Tom Fido. Fido's board Marge oh ok Tom Fido's board. It was a very busy board. It was pretty popular. and my software was unique in that it was small and compact and it was not written in basic and it did not have all that crappy limitations that basic has. People were asking for copies of it which I gladly supplied. One of them was John Madill in Baltimore Md. He was just a real sharp guy and we ended up like calling each others boards back and forth and uploading files and getting latest versions and chatting you know chat mode and all that kind of crap and you know, inflating our phone bills Marge Uhu samething we all do today Tom Yeah, oh yeah not much is different about it except that phone calls cost less now. Marge plus you can get more stuff in one call Tom Yeah this was at 1200 baud Marge oooh! Tom and uh not everybody had it. um So its a long ...I forget what brought the idea back up. I thought out the machine to machine business again as it was also a big giant hack...the hack value was very high. I just sat down and just sorta did the design work, apparently nobody else ever got beyond the hoppity hop across the country with local calls bit. Well first of all its ridiculous. Second of all you'd never identify all the local calling areas and if each of them is ten miles wide you know the US is 3500 miles wide its crazy so I said well given that long distance AT&T is $11 bucks an hour after 11... Marge 11 bucks an hour? Tom 11 bucks an hour, 1200 baud, a page of text, 2000 bytes you know you can do the arithmatic yourself its pretty straight forward. It works about to be about 25 cents per call. So I said what's the big problem? That's obviously not it. And I worked out the basic principles what Fido was about which were written down in the Fidohist documents I'm not even sure I can recite them anymore. But basically they're ... Marge That's ok. I've got those. Tom Yeah at this point that fido that history is, its actually pretty accurate It was written in 1985 or 86. So it hadn't hadn't gone too much adrift by then. Probably better than my memory. Which is not always very accurate. Marge well considering the contradictions I'm getting from everybody else I'll trust your memory. Tom Yeah there's a lot of bad... matter of fact theres a lot of, not just like you know memory drift which is just inevitable there's people with fucking agendas and I'd like to strangle them all individually and throw their bodies over a cliff. Marge Well we'll get into that. But I've got people telling me that IFNA didn't die until 1991. Tom Huh? Really? Well you know maybe there was vestigial legal leftovers didn't drop dead until 91, but it was quite dead before that. I had written them disallowing them to use the words [Fido and FidoNet] much earlier than that. I don't remember exactly when. I can look it up. 87 88 89 Something like that. Marge The vote to kill it was in the fall of 89. I missed voting by one nodelist entry. That was when I joined Fido. Tom Oh yeah that sounds about right. It's written down somewhere. I've got some of those docs. I saved the legal letters. The ones that we sent out with lawyers. Marge hum..well get back to Fido. We can get to Ifna later. Tom yeah Where was I? Oh I wrote a design specification and everything unfortunately I don't even have a copy anymore. One thing I've never had because I've never had enough money and hardware and I don't have the continuity the mainframe and university people have and I don't have a lot of my own files from back then. Cause I would change computer systems and they would be completely incompatable and there would be no mass movement of my data from one system to another. You know people would go to school and have accounts on the university machines that stuff's all taken care of for them. Marge uhu Tom You know get an account somewhere on some machine.. they change from a Vax to a some whatever other machine from some company they get backups of harddisks and they move the data over and they're done. Marge That's too bad now Tom yeah it certainly is. You know I hated to drag around this box of 8 inch single sided single density floppies for years and now I can't read them anymore. so I threw them out a longtime ago which was probably a mistake too. But Marge I'm not going to contradict you on that one. Anyway Tom I have a different approach now. I keep everything on my hard disk and if I need more hard disks I just have to find a way to buy more and I back that up on tape and everything just stays live now. No more offline storage. Offline storage is the thing that killed me. Marge That is a pain, I'll agree. so tell me about the first fido, about them talking together. Tom Well it was pretty exciting. I remember that much. I don't remember exactly what happened. basicly it was John Madill and I. I didn't even have enough machines to test it across the room. so it was a lot of writing into the dark. But the designs are amazing consistent over time, even with the new wazoo mailers the methodology is pretty much the same. The first one would dial, send messages and hang up. It did not do file attach, it did not do lots of things. It did also multiple messages in one pass. But what it did not even do (um of course fidonet predates nets and and zones and regions and all that crap so it initially um) Fido did only point to point mail I mean literally point to point; if you had three systems in Boston and a message to each of those systems Fido make three phone calls. Marge so there was no such thing as routed mail from one board to another? Tom Not for the first month or two. But the thing is there is about ten years of history crammed into like 6 months of developement. Fidonet has it was defined in like June of 84 was very very unsophisticated, but by December it was getting pretty damned smart. And also the terrain, the BBS world, is completely different. It's not even conceivable now, with the things people now take for granted. I got away with it because it didn't matter. There weren't 4 baords you could call in Boston. They just weren't there. There weren't 4 fidos. Just one. That was it. So some of this stuff that seems so like completely unlivable today just didn't matter then. Marge That makes sense. Tom And as they became important, they got solved very quickly. In St Louis was where the first serious Fido BBS clustering happened. Marge ok how did the guys in St. Louis get involved? How did they find out what you were doing? Tom Oh I don't know how they found out, they probably just called my board. Fido 2 was John Madill Fido 3 who was it I think it was a guy in Atlanta Fido 4 was Tony Clark in St. Louis 5 was oh boy somebody I forget 5 I think he was Oregon somewhere 6 was of course Kaplan had oregon 7 was a flaky number that went away 8 flaky number 9 Connecticut we scattered around the country very instantly. Marge That must have been pretty exciting Tom yeah 10, 11 and 12 were all in St. Louis 16, 17, 22 were all St. Louis There were what um NDC/RCC, McDonald Douglas Radio Control Club can you hold on a second? I think I have a runny nose. Marge Sure Tom sorry I have an allergy this morning Marge That's alright. This is the time of year for it. Tom Yeah, its irritating. Marge Be glad you don't live out here in corn country. I am thoroughly miserable from the middle of August until past the middle of October when frost hits. Tom oh boy yeah that's painful. Marge I don't go outside much, believe me. Tom um Marge ok so at what point did you start doing routing? Having one board pass mail on to another so you weren't all calling each other? Tom oh what happened was that we there wasn't much call for it for at the time. I mean there was just too many unknowns. and the biggest unknowns were the social ones not technical ones. What happened was Fido started to cluster [new Fido BBS's distribution matching areal population density] which was hardly a surprise. Because they started clustering where people are and of course there are more people in cities. Well it became obvious that when I make three phone calls to St. Louis to deliver mail to systems that are all within local calls of each other that something's got to be done. So I worked out a scheme and a syntax to do routing. FOr example, Fidos 4, 10, 16,17, and 22 were all in St. Louis, all a local call from each other. I had to have some way to tell Fido to send all those messages in one call to one of those systems. And we had to have some way to tell that St. Louis Fido that received the mail that it was ok to to forward on these messages. I did two things. One was to make Fido not really care where messages came from, just where they wanted to go to. So if a message appeared either entered by a local human or appeared from from another Fido it would say ah this message doesn't belong to me this belongs over there, I'm going to deliver it. Um there are of course all kinds of delivery controls, ACCEPT-FROMs, and all that kind of stuff. The other thing I had to do was make it say, oh, I know all these systems go in one call. This was I believe version 10. And that was done with this thing called the routing table. The first attempt was this hideous method that I kinda of abandoned pretty quickly and used to be distributed within the nodelist itself. Its replacement is the basic syntax still used by Fido today. It ended by getting implemented as an N by N crossbar switch, where "N" is the number of nodes in the nodelist, but the table is only two-N entries long. Radically different from most mailers today which are oriented towards echomail. Of course Fido allows any you to route any piece of mail to go to any other node at random at any time. And the tables to do so are pretty small. for every nodelist entry there is 16 bytes or something. Marge Uhu Tom Um so we had the rudiments of routing down, but we still didn't have the hierarchy of nets and nodes. That came later. Which was basicly the formalization of this informal routing scheme. And you know its funny. There were two things It was very awkward when there was about 50 nodes. Fido could do point to point mail and it could do a file attach and it could bundle up multiple messages for an area. You know essentially put itself in a net. Marge Uhu Tom there's two hideous kludges that went away at the end of 84. One was, how to define an autonomous network within FidoNet. For example, St. Louis is autonomous and how they arranged their business is none of their business. And we don't really care how they do it internally. This was one of the basic anarchist principles, deciding where the control of FidoNet ended, and individual sysops remained. Marge Tell that to some of the coordinators today Tom well at that time the net coordinators are actually the best thing about Fidonet and the least of our problems. I mean if you live in an area that has a real jerk of an NC you're kinda screwed. But the thing is their mental illness doesn't tend to spew over an area, you know. A bad NC in New York won't really have much affect in California. Marge That's true. Actually I'm lucky. My NC's a pussycat. He does exactly what we tell him to then keeps quiet the rest of the time. Tom yeah most of them do actually. There's very few troublemaking NCs. People don't realize that the amount of social engineering going on. It was quite explicit. but the NCs have a very intimate relationship relatively speaking with their members than say an RC or ZC which are late model artifacts that I had nothing to do with. The only thing that we designed in in March of 85 was NCs. And there was an RC function but it was completely different from today. Today's thing is a complete perversion of it. but basicly we realized that even an asshole NC has to live in the same city essentially or the same region. Marge Right. Tom You could have a meeting you're actually going to physically meet this person unlike somebody who is all the way across the country. I mean that was builtin. I was very explicit about and that still holds true. my personal rule of relationships is: the closer you are to somebody the more information/interaction you exchange with them. You talk to them, you know who they are, what they look like, you hear more of their output, you know you talk to your friends down the street more than you might talk to your relatives across the country. Marge Right Tom And your relationship to them, all other things being equal, you know casual acquaintances versus relatives you'll be closer, you'll have more uptodate knowledge, and more obligations to and obligations from local people. And we relied on that fact to keep the NCs in line. But at the time it was just so things won't get so disconnected. And that part's proven pretty much true. So if you've got a completely irate handful of people in a net and an NC who's conspiring with them. You show up at a big meeting everybody sees it. Whereas if its across the country like our congress critters, who the hell knows what they're doing.You can't see them. You never get to meet them and you don't see them in action. Marge That's for sure. Tom so anyway we formalized that process. a lot of its actually written down in the Fidohist Documents. About the way the scheduling was done. The scheduling used to be done in this nodelist of all places. Gross! Ben Baker was doing all the routing at the time and scheduling. He split off a program that did the nodelist and one that did routing seperately. Marge So now you had two external programs? Tom Well at this time we had a whole bunch of external programs. But this was an external data structure that that turned into um what the hell's the program? it later became makenl and stuff but at the time it was called makelist or something. I forget what the hell it was called. There was also one called routegen. At this point in time Thom Henderson was starting to come along. what I was doing at the time was basicly making all the protocols public in the public domain. I was trying to document it, not very well but I was trying to document the data structure even though I never gave source to Fido out I wanted all the structures to be public for Fidonet. Marge ok, timewise where were we? Tom Oh still 84 Marge ok Tom Still 84 possibly early 85 but about that time. I was badly documenting this stuff and I forget now when Henderson popped up. It might have been I think he came by in 85 I'm not sure. But I think it was within the first year. towards the end of the first year. The last 6 months of the first year of actual operation which would put it I would say spring of 85 plus or minus. He can correct it. Its probably written down somewhere. He reverse engineered Fido which was fine. and um between you and me he wasn't really willing to ask questions, he maintained that bad attitude all these years. Its really wierd to me. Marge ok what did he do to it? Tom oh I don't mean he reverse engineered the fidonet program itself, but the protocols, which was fine because it probably my poor ability to document them that drove him to that; I don't have any real problem with that. Its just that he never bothered to ask which was odd. But he wrote seadog which was a fidonet interface essentially without a bulletin board which was great. Marge ok Tom I just got news that he did this thing that was more graphically oriented. And he was definately aimed in the business direction and that was fine. there was no problem with that. And then he contributed a lot actually. He wrote the arc program. The archiver and compressor. Marge Yeah, I knew about that. Tom Before that the functions were seperate. There was FQ and lu and lar. I had written lu out of this older program called lar which was written out of an even older program that came out of the unix world called archive. And lar was a library archive and it was a hideous clunky gross disgusting program that didn't really compile and you know basicly it did arc without compression. It mashed a bunch of files into a single file. and I wrote a cleaner one and it was used a lot on bulletin boards. It seems obvious now, but it wasn't obvious then to make an archiver that did compression and archiving at the same time. He wrote some of the nodelist processing stuff too. He's cranky, but we were all weird I suppose. no crankier than the rest of us. and Ben Baker was writing code and the nodelist management stuff and Ken Kaplin came in during all this. He defined the fidonet as we know it today and held it together for more than a couple of years. The IFNA stuff kinda knocked him out. He was kinda a strong believer in IFNA when it all collapsed he fell apart and dropped out. he also got flamed a lot mostly undeservedly. And even when some criticism was due it was simply one ofprocess or lack of or whatever. He was never malicious never never never malicious. Not once. Marge Ok lets back up a little bit. One of the things I've done is read all the back issues of fidonews, and it seems to me like at some point the net turned on you guys and did nothing but criticize. Was there a reason for that? Tom That's what happens when you get any bunch of people together. All you can see is the bad parts and you can't see what went before. It happens today still. I've learned certainly some obvious technical things, but boy I've learned a lot about large social structures wow which I've used since in other projects. so at least we learned how to build social structures. what happens when you put a lot of people together is it always looks like hell but it tends to be fairly robust and we were hehe in discovery on this ah um. Marge Ok so you started out with nets. That makes sense. How did RCs come into play? How did they come into being? Tom What we were noticing was that as you if you put little dots on a map where Fido's were they were appearing in clumps around population centers. No big surprise. Marge that makes sense. Tom There were many of couse out in the middle of Iowa somewhere or some smaller city where there was only one node. So what we did was define this thing called a region, that included all the Fido's in some geographical area that were not in a city and therefore in a net. To the FidoNet program regions looked like Nets, but instead of sending all the mail for a region to one single Fido host for later redelivery, each would be delivered directly, one by one, like in the original, pre-net design. This was because in fact, they were not able to take advantage of the local-call thing, but we wanted ther administrative function of the net coordinator, to keep their list of Fidos, the FIdos within a region. Syntactically, they all looked the same, 100/51 was Fido 51 in net 100, while 10/1 was Fido 1 in region 10. The person sending email didn't have to know anything. Marge allright ********* tape 1 side B Marge Right Tom and the figure to the right of the slash was your old fido number which were assigned sequencially starting with one. until we did a switchover. Then we defined magical address 0 as the entry point for that net. Every net by defination has a 0 node and it would be physically the same as one of the numbered nodes in the net. So in St Louis's case I think it was 22 I'm not sure. 100/22 was Ken Kaplin's board but 100/0 was the logical entry point for the net. It wasn't necesary physical but it usually mapped onto one of the existing fidonet nodes. So we had a mathimatical model that was independant of physical reality. And that's all neat and clean. That's all fine, what to do with the region the outlying areas. So what we did was, we defined them as large giant geographical regions. And um you pick a region host who has a 0 address like you know region 10 Marge Yeah Tom The other function of NCs was to maintain their fragment of the nodelist which was sort of an obvious functon and that's one that's worked out pretty well. It was a reasonable decision at the time and has remained so. Incoming host is just a big paper throne. Their machine gets to handle incoming mail and make more phone calls and they get to maintain their little fragment of the list. So I decided, its funny none of the software in the world does it anymore except Fido, to syntactically make them look the same net 125 and region 10 but the software behaved very differently. If my system has a message destined for 100/22 Fido knows to it says 100 that's another net, that's not my net. So it goes to 100/0 and it makes a packet and sends it to 100/0. So there's a lot of messages that go for net 100 you know 2 22 16 50 whatever the hell they would all go to the same bundle the same file that would be delivered to 100/0 Who would take it apart and distribute the messages. The regions however, even though they look the same you know like 10/1 or 10/2 the software knew that it was a region and it would not do that bundling. You know it would deliver each message individually. It would make a phone call for every message it had in region 10 for example. Marge ouch Tom And the way it knew the difference was in the raw distribution nodelist different keywords defined nets and regiosn. Marge right tom surprisingly little software does this today. Um it was complex enough that people didn't understand it. Marge sounds kinda simple to me, but go ahead. Tom um yeah its very odd. Fido was all point to point mail There was no echomail at the time. That was a relatively new invention. I don't know exactly when I put file attaches in. That was one of John Madill's suggestions. You know as soon as he mentioned it seemed obvious. and it got done pretty quickly. Basicly before June of 85 we had a flat system that would send messages and files, it could pack up mail for multiple sites into one phone call but it did so by these explicit maps. So after June we had something that looked very much like the modern Fidonet. Minus echomail. Then there was just a whole bunch of lateral growth. Things got bigger. Wynn Wagner III was working on some bulletin board on his own. Appariently he was actually working on a similliar thing to fidonet. But when Fidonet came by and it was obviously just like this large thing already existing he had written a lot of the wazoo protocols. He just wrote the fidonet compatable stuff and plugged it into his bulletin board. And it started talking on FidoNet. And his was a much more full featured system than mine. He had different ideas than me. I was going after the lowest common denominator. The most common denominator universality. He wanted to go after the vertical features. You know graphics and all that kind of stuff. But that's fine. That's what its all about. And you know Henderson was doing his own thing with sort of a personal mailer. The Saint Louis gang was maintaining the nodelist. They were massively improving the accuracy getting methodology on how to put the nodelist together, how to qualify nodes and all that kind of stuff. Somewhere here I met Randy Bush via FidoNet. he's a crusty crumudgeon with a very strong lefty background. He likes code. He does stuff. He doesn't care about posturing so much as getting things done. He liked FidoNet because it was an extremely low cost grass roots communications tool. He was like me um sufficiently paranoid to not want to rely on a centralized organizational scheme. when he saw the documentation problem I was having he jumped in and offered to document it. And he did. He did FSC-0001 and we're using it to this day. And basicly without those documents Fido wouldn't be where it is today. A lot of people can not stand him He is crusty. And he got that whole technical standards committee seeded. And that's the document all the later stuff has been written from. Marge We're still following that one today aren't we? Tom oh yes absolutel Hell yes Because it is a very informal committee of a bunch of developers who have these documents and there is no authority. Its this very delicate balance of credibility. And most of the developers recognized that standards are necessary. And while some of them were stupid there's problems here and there the kind of obvious stuff. they also recognized that it's got to be this way. Some think, this is stupid, I'll just write the best program in the world and everybody will use it and occasionally they cause a lot of mess, but usually their withers away. Tom so let me think where we were Marge let me ask you a digression question here. There's been a lot of moaning and groaning lately about the technical standards committee is not doing anything and we're stuck on the least common denominator as opposed to upgrading the standards to the latest and greatest. How do you feel about that issue? Tom They simply don't know what going on. And they don't know how its supposed to work. Marge The average sysop doesn't, but that's beside the point. Tom well the thing is the standard's committe is not supposed to design features. The technical standards committee does not design things, they document. They are merely defining, by writing down what's already being done what the common denominator is. It has nothing to do with features. Features are done by developers. And yes they move exceedingly slowly because the lowest common denominator has to move slowly and it does move slowly. Its all too trivial and easy to just write super features continuously continuously continuously that's not the problem. the problem is to have a network scattered across the planet still be able to talk to itself. Because there people just now starting to write programs for new hardware some of it's really low end. And at the same time there are programs for like Dos and Windows and whatever that have been around for 5 close to 10 years exceedingly well developed and refined, that the new people will never achive because the other people had a five year headstart. So if you let the leading edge of technology drive things it will collapse into chaos. So I think people just don't get it. I don't know why people are waiting for the standards committee to tell them to do things anyway. Its another case of people wanting others to do their work. It doesn't stop anyone from writing features That's for sure. Marge that's true Ok tell me about regions. I think that's where we are in the story. Tom oh yeah well what happened was we defined this logical entity called a region which on paper looks like a net. what we did was divide North America into 13 regions. so that there'd be as many people here in California/Nevada as there is like out in the East coast. We put the regions where the population was. Marge ok so regions were supposed to function as nets? Tom they were supposed to function only administratively as nets. The NC would be this person who will help you get online , he's got the files you need and all that garbage. But if it happened in the middle of the California desert for instance where's that guy going to go? He's not in a net. He would just fall into the geographical area for the region. The idea was as you plunked down more nodes the region host would have more and more nodes but as soon as they got enough to get in a clump that little clump would split off and form a net and the region host load would drop a little bit. And that's pretty much how it went. Like Fremont Calif which is a medium sized city, but its time was not you know it was not populated with Fido's. As it got 2 3 and 4 Fidos they split off from the region and the region host went from having 40 nodes under his list to having 35 or 30 so that load didn't go up fast. And this was all designed in March of 85 What happened was the real problem was the nodelist was getting to be large. It was getting to be to be like 64K long and I've forgotten when that happened. Something like late 85 or 86 Marge Ok Tom um it had to also do with echomail making things very popular. Also machines were getting cheaper and modems were getting cheaper and all this in hindsight is obvious. The NCs and RCs would make their own little fragments of the nodelist and would fidonet mail it to Saint Louis where Ken Kaplin would compile it into one big nodelist, then Ken would mail out a copy of that file to all the NCs. And that worked fine for a while until it ended up sending a lot of 64K files at 1200 Baud Marge you know that could do a real number on the phone bill Tom yeah and it was also one of the drives to form IFNA to help pay for nodelits distribution phone bills and stuff like that. And this was getting to be a full time job. So anyway Ben Baker did the diff process which instead of mailing out the whole nodelist they could mail out a difference from last week's nodelist which was vastly smaller. Then even that got to be too many phone calls, too. So we decided to tier this whole thing, for regional distribution. So the RCs seemed the logical choice. At this point I was sort of out of the loop of running this stuff. I did not flag it as a bad decision. I don't remember it as such. I might have, I might not have. Well what happened was they ended up building a heirarchy. It unloaded a lot of work and things they just went along. The nodelits was getting to be such a big burden that quick solutions got done that probably weren't best in the long run, but nobody knew ...How the hell could you know how to do this stuff. Its not like you could look at all the other amateur networks out there and see what they're doing. Or other national groups without money that had severe technical coordination problems. So the IFNA thing came by. I think it was Ken Kaplin's idea but I was right there. It was like gee what if we had an organization like the Radio Amateur Relay League. Its off to the side, it doesn't control anything Its utterly not mandatory to join. Its a highly optional club you could join, get a newsletter and little badge you know and pay dues and you know, all that kind of junk. And what it would do was would pay for Ken Kaplin's phone bill, send representatives to Electronic Mail association meetings and all that kind of stuff. Marge that makes sense Tom Basicly good stuff. Marge Ok had anybody written any policy at this point? Policy 1 policy 2 policy 3? When did that stuff come into play? Tom Yes it did and 1 and 2 I don't have any files before policy 4. I would love to have a copy of earlier policy documents Marge I would too. Tom The thing is its another one of these revisionist things. It always happens. I don't think there were actually polices 1 and 2. I don't think they were called that. They were just somebody wrote a net etiquette file and then somebody just went from there. IF you go backwards in history you don't find a straight line you find this messy cloud. the fidohist documents were used for a lot of things. I'm not sure if I quoted the thou shalt not annoy thou shalt not be easily annoyed in there. If I did, I did not make it up. Ken Kaplin or Ben Baker who made that up. Or maybe even Tom Henderson which was kinda of ironic. But that was one of the earliest ones. Ken Kaplin was certainly a proponent of it. Marge So those history docs are actually a fore runner of policy? Tom Also the early policy docs were not Policy docs. That actually began with policy 4 Its not like policy. Its policy and procedure. The procedure part is what everybody sort of wants to have. How we qualify what you have to do to be in the nodelist. And its not completely arbitrary. There's good solid reasons for it. Even if occasionally the reasons were wrong. The intent was to eliminate errors and technical problems. And all of the requirements are technical only and there's not much of a problem with the procedural But basicly the procedural stuff is great. Its what should be in the document and what it used to be 99%. Policy 4 is about 2/3 bullshit policy and 1/3 solid procedure. What's happened was we just didn't know enough. Probably I screwed up by not defining these things well enough. And things got blurred and instead of things getting thought out clearly so policy and procedure got all mushed together in a hideous mess. We're working on a solution today. which is well kind of amusing. Marge If I turn the tape off will you tell me about it? Tom Ah later Its not done yet. Marge Ok Tom Its Randy Bush wrote it up once in a document called the Revolution 9 and its around. Its a way to automate things that are considered policy now. I think its going to go out with a whimper and a bang and nobody will notice after it goes through that its done any other way. So you know the policy documents were everything was sort of the world was sort of benign at that time. Marge So when did things get messed up? Tom Well right from the start. There were whiners and nutcases right from the ten node level. politics is what happens when you greater than 2 people. when you have 100 people or more your bound to have people who are just completely dissatisfied with whatever the hell you're doing. Cause that's standard they want something else. They don't have the control, they're not programmers or whatever the hell and off it goes. and the only real problem is everyone acts as if its this horrible unexpected thing like we're so disappointed that somebody's upset and nobody likes what we're doing. its the nievity that's really the bad part. It just goes with the territory. The other thing that I learned was that a well run thing is not necessarily a smoothly run thing. Fidonet is not smoothly run. Its chaotic, its backstabbing its whining and complaining and things crashing all the place. But this is normal and healthy. I think Fidonet is gettinga little bit unhealthy at the moment and I think this has to do litterally and absolutely the ZC/RC structure and nothing else. And maybe the EC guys in some cases. Marge What do you think the solution is? We're definately digressing, but this is interesting. Tom We're going to get rid of them, lock stock and barrel. Marge Are you sure the tape should be running? Tom What? Marge I said are you sure the tape should be running at this point? Tom Oh I've been saying this for years. Marge It sounds to me like you're actually plotting something now. Tom ah yeah eventually the idea is to eliminate the preceived need for them. And um the nodelist is the center of it. That's the center of their power. Like the ability to kick people out of it like out of the net that he doesn't like. That's complete perversion and corruption of what the hell supposed to be going on with that stuff. Oh the original idea and this was original idea this is from March of 85 was that an inverse proportional relationship thing. Well you know those who were close had more power. Those who were far away had less. And it was arranged that it was so. You know an NC in San Francisco has no effect on a guy in St. Louis. Absolutely none. You know all the posts are on paper anyway. If an NC was a total jerk you threw him out. Not much problem to get rid of him you just sort of stopped using him. You just make your own list you mail out to everyone else ignore the idiot screaming over there This guy is the NC signed supporting sysops. its a done deed. And that happens more than once and its a fine thing. What happened was we ended up with this backdoor heirarchy put in essentially by the St. Louis guys but not out of maliciousness but just sort of out of everybody figured that we just had to get stuff done. And they basicly built this heirarchy of RCs and later ECs that had no checks on them. No balances whatsoever. The original balances were put in with the original RC and NC stuff. There were no ZCs. Cause then there were no zones. Even though it was flawed, highly flawed at least it had been thought out. The way to limit power. These guys that were doing the nodelist stuff even though they tended to be good guys orginally and of course it was guys it was 95% male and had been for a long time It just like other things tends to freeze itself into place. And at least with the early stuff, the early defined things people understood and perceived there to be paper posts and no actual power Everyone knew that was supposed to be how it worked. Even though NCs occasionally get away with murder, you know reading people's mail and stuff that tends to not be the rule cause its sorta outrageous. But the RCs and ZCs could do whatever they want because they were just making things good. Nobody wrote down what they were supposed to not be doing. So that's what happens. Marge Ok tell me about IFNA Tom Well it was sort of a good idea that was kinda ill formed What was designed by Ken Kaplin and me and other people was a pretty benign thing. Two things happened. Of course nievity naivity was a huge part of it again. Let me think what exactly happened. Lawyers first of all. two different lawyers. As conceived by the original gang of co-conspirators it was basicly like I said like the AARL voluntary club informal representative. that part was fine. Nobody had any real problems with that. At this point the conspiracy seekers were starting to see efforts to control in places were there really weren't any. We were starting to talk about what we could offer tshirts coffee mugs insurance cheap modem deals .... Then we had what was basicly the first Fido conference in Colorada Springs Colorado. I think that was 87. Pretty sure that was in 87. Marge I probably have that written down some place. Tom Yeah 86 or 87 We were going to announce the full plan for this IFNA thing. And its wierd I had audio tapes of the whole proceeding. It was so hateful I erased them. Oh how I regret that. Oh my god do I regret that. There's no other record of it. I had it on tape. Don Kulha made them. Well ok it was kinda ill formed in some ways but it wasn't unrepairable. It was certainly had no mandatory or control aspects to it. But what happened was the people that who hosted the conference one of them was a lawyer. And he caught wind of this and I don't think he even had viscious things in mind he was just a lawyer and he liked to set up complicated structures. So he set up this horrible horrible thing that was just awful; the word railroad job was used a lot. At the tim I thought they were wrong, but in hindsight yeah they were right it was a railroad job. For starters, you werent' allowed to vote on the thing unless you paid to join it first. Which was PR disaster and probably illegal but all he cared about was getting it ramrodded through making the club really big so he could take credit for having made this big organization rather than thinking about what the people involved wanted. So it started off on the worst possible foot. People were screaming and yelling paranoia it seemed like paranoia at the time but it was actually pretty accurate. I have to admit Whereas the people like me and Ken Kaplin envisioned like this club you could join or not. And if you didn't there would be no ill effects whatsover. It ended up being billed by this lawyer guy and some of his cronies as this thing that will run Fidonet for you. So all hell broke loose. Then what happened is shit attracts flies. More shit attracts more flies I started to get disillusioned with this thing. I forget when I dropped out of it. But I dropped out of it pretty quickly. This is not a good idea. We should drop it. Ken Kaplin and a bunch of other people said no no we just need to fix some of these bad problems. and with the nieve optimism of trying to go ahead and do some of this stuff *************** begining of tape 2 Marge Hey Tom if you want the tape stopped at any time just say so. Tom I was a little nieve. To put it mildly. So anyways the IFNA thing became very distasteful, I dropped out. I had written to this other lawyer named Thomas Marshall scumbag you can put that on tape Marge Don't worry its on there. Tom Oh my God what a pig, what a horrible well anyway what he had done was gotten involved in IFNA so fast with dollar signs in his eyes over this idea of mandatory membership. You know to control to operate fidonet. He saw Fidonet as a gigantic commercial possibility which is something I was 100% sensitive to the whole time. And still am, though I'm not too much worried now. He wanted to make everybody pay money to be in the net. The next year a terrible terrible thing happened in Virginia. I think it was the next year. He got involved and he started playing off all sides of all fences he was my lawyer for trademark stuff and ripped me off royally. He was Thom Henderson's lawyer over trademark issues and he was IFNA's lawyer. He was running deals for all of us. And that's all fine when everybody's friends. You know, you just sort of do each other favors. But he was working it hard. He was a real piece of shit. What his was doing was probably illegal as well. He charged me three thousand bucks for trademarks and dragged on for a year and a half and did a lousy job. He did similliar things to Henderson. IFNA had exclusive right to use the trademarks Fido fidonet, and the dog with the diskette which was a disaster. I mean definately horrible things could happen. Luckily with Ken Kaplin who was pretty altruistic and definately honest he was not a problem. But Marshall was definately behind the scenes, sometimes in front of it trying to manipulate stuff. It got really really hateful. We ended up fighting corporate politics, over the control of the nodelist in Fidonet. It got really bad. We got a lawyer, they got a bunch of lawyers actually. We had a little secret cabal. No one knows who it was. And I'm not going to tell you any more. I love conspiracy. But its a benign conspiracy. Really. Marge Ok Tom We're on our side. Marge and that automaticly makes you the good guys? Tom Of course. Doesn't it with everyone else? Marge should I play this tape for the entire net and let them vote on it? Actually probably very few people are going to hear this tape. Tom I'm not worried. You know everybody's got people they work with and so that's that. Marge No the point is anything on this tape I publicize I'll clear with you first. Tom Ah ok well thanks. We can talk more about that later. Marge Well that's only fair. That way If you say something you want reworded we can do that too. there's probably only 4 or 5 people I'll play the tape for because they're helping me write the history. Tom yeah well that's fine. Marge Ok Tom I forget when IFNA died. I guess it was 89. Marge it was fall of 89. Tom yeah 89 in San Jose actually. It was a fidocon that was the final the final legal stuff got done. Oh wait a second though there was another there was another event that I attended in Oregon either before or after the 89 Fidocon Um how does it go? Luckily these things are dated. I can find them out. I'll endure it for the moment.Its a minor point, not a critical one. Marge yeah we can work on the timeline later. Tom yeah. the IFNA debacle. Tom Marshall had taken me aside in 88 in Virginia at the fidocon. oh my god it was really gross. They had this big dinner, Ken Kaplin went for these Fidocons all out big convention hotels you know 80 bucks a night and this heart-attack food. You know these big buffets with potatoes and meat and canned vegetables and all that kind of crap So we get into this thing and its all fido people, just a bunch of goofball nerd computer programmers and you know its not an umm classy crowd. I like it. Its good old solid middle America, you know. Marge Uhu Tom working class stiffs. Here we go into this you know this cheesball ritzy hotel with polished brassplated steel tubing and um we go into this big room. And there's the IFNA board up on a raised platform with their little table seperated from everyone else. And boy was that the wrong thing to do with this crowd. Oh boy people were pissed off. It was great though. They didn't even see their own folly. And they just you know Fidonet is relatively speaking lowbrow. I mean its not pretentious. Its not a professional organization with a capitol P profession. Marge Uhu Tom People don't wear suits usually. They're just you know for the most part quasy apolitical working class middle class nerds. This was just a bad thing to do to them because it said we're seperate from you, we're better than you. We're on a raised platform. And some people who were given seats up on the raised platform like Hank Wever from Holland and myself and Wynn Wagner who actually sat up there for a whle than came back down made it very plain we were not going to take part in this farce. So they all did the usual dinner stuff of having speakers and clapping of hands patting everybody else patting everybody on the back. They gave me this little plastic plaque and said make a little speech and I got up and said oh my god it was horrible, I was terribly embarrised to speak I was embarrised at what I said, but I said If anybody goes along with this IFNA stuff you deserve what you get. its not supposed to be centralized. Its supposed to be grassroots what do you think you're doing here? This whole thing is a farce and an embarrissment and no clapping apalled silence red faces, and Ken Kaplin said Tom well that about wraps it up Marge Tom oh it was so much fun. It was great. That got written up in OMNI magazine Of all places. That was fun. Marge it sounds like you shocked them. Tom Oh I was furious. I was absolutely furious. I was just that livid. Thomas Marshall had taken me aside before the dinner. That was the scumbag lawyer guy and said um we're going to do this thing and you know we're going to control Fidonet and develop it ocmmercially. People were saying will what if the Acme Corporation had a bulletin board and they were part of Fidonet. Are they commercial or not? Most of them were run by an employee who manages to scam a phone line and computer and they soft of nominally support the company's products or not and well its the Acme Company's bulletin board, its really just another bulletin board. It has public callers and files and you know like a little bit of data sheets on the products, but mostly its just a bulletin board. I personally don't call those commercial bulletin boards. And most people at that time didn't. But that was the kind of stuff that was being decided. Well Tom Marshall said we want to charge anybody associated with any business $1800 a year to be in the nodelist. And if you look go down the list, you'll find that about half of them in some way are associated with a business like the sysop's a consultant or is an employee of a company like the Acme Corporation running a bulletin board sort of on the sly. In otherwords he saw a huge pile of money here. And I had the last laugh a few years later, me and a bunch of other people and a whole bunch of legal fees later. So um yeah that was the begining of the end. The next year was San Jose I think and before or after that was this thing in Portland which was, I think, region 16 con well it was pretty civilized. It was nice and friendly. It was in sort of a small-c christian retreat in the outskirts of Portland. Really nice place, really great people. And you know we sat around doing tall tale telling. And sitting around telling some history as all social organizations do. There was more machinations there, phone calling, conspiring. We actually had to work out another lawyer's letter to stomp on these guys, basicly threaten them with a lawsuit if they didn't desist. I had withdrawn permission to use the trademarks from IFNA at this point. And they continued to anyway which was a good sign because it was the begining of the end I mean obviously they were running out of stuff. And it finally got killed entirely I guess it was 89. When I wrote letters to everybody saying you can not use the trademarks change your name immediately you know in 30 days. They started a proxy war. We got more votes than they did at the last minute. Marge Ok question Fabian Gordon, in net 107 had been accused of infiltrating IFNA and killing it from within. Is there any truth to those accusations? Fabian Gordon he was NC of net 107 back then. Deathnet. Tom Oh yeah Well a lot of us did exactly that thing. Of course he did. So did I. They were doin what I think was very clearly a very evil controling thing and we used the same scabby weapons they did to kill it. what they did was wrest control of the nodelist from the fidonet. they had exclusive control over the trademarks and then by this meeting in 89 they walked in armed with proxies literally under their belt. You know this one person walked in with 4 or 5 proxies. And were going to change the bylaws so that they could change the bylaws anytime they wanted to without requiring a vote of the membership. Marge Oh geeze, that's dumb. Tom yeah well That's what they were about to do. So what we did, we caught wind of this we got ourselves with faxes and phone calls we got us like one more proxy than they did. We appointed me president or something and pulled a coup on them. Then to dissolve this ugly mess we basicly got them to agree to put it to a vote of the fidonet nodelist at large. We took a copy of the nodelist and froze it then said ok this is the voting list. Right? And we intentionally worded it to require a positive acknowledgement of IFNA. not a default yes, a default no. I forget how the wording was. It was something to the effect of if you want IFNA to exist and run Fidionet send in a yes vote. Of course no one will do that. And they didn't. And the IFNA dropped dead. Then the board voted itself to dissolve. The legal disolution might have happened in 91 they were quite dead after that vote. They had no credibility left whatsoever. And there was a lot of hard feelings about it. Um There had been fallings out among people like Ben Baker and Ken Kaplin was totally burned out by this. ALl those who just loved money and did not give a shit, they would say anything and they would do or say anything to appease the anti-commercial people. They thought I was a total fool. I don't really care about that. they just wanted to make a lot of goddamed money. And we were saying fine not here. And yes we intentionally attacked IFNA and killed it. As far as I was concerned it was for the better. I mean it was inarguably better. unless you were just trying to make money. Marge Ok, I can see that. Now let's drop politics and go back to history. I'm very curious about how echomail as opposed to netmail got started. And where in hell did the ECs come from? Tom um Marge and that part of the tape I'm definately not going to play to a few people. Tom up from the depths of hell. Marge now watch it. Some of my best friends are ECs. Tom well same here but some of the bad ones are really bad. Marge I know Tom Mostly they're completely cool. they just don't understand what they're messing with. They don't understand that they are obligated to transmitt people's mail is the thing they don't get. Marge But in the begining wasn't it just mostly netmail? Tom yes, it was only netmail and what happened was Jeff Rush AKA the shadow one of the millions of shadows I'm sure. I mean how many shadows are there in the world? Marge well I've got two of them in an echo I moderate and it can be a lot of fun. Tom Well anyway Jeff rush was in the dallas area they were basicly having like these pizza based meetings, arranging thins over netmail using crude mailing list things. Marge Uhu ok Tom Well it was barely adequate. So he wrote scan and toss as were two seperate programs. It was not called echomail yet. It had lists of what systems to send a message to, and used netmail as the transport mechanism. It was fairly basic but it was definately an interesting use of Fidonet. Well what happened was um it spread like wildfire because it allowed mailing lists for the first time, basicly. And then it killed Fidonet. The traffic was just enormous. It was just beyound the ability of Fidonet. Um because everything was writtin for occasional point to point mail you know it wasn't really meant for these huge floods. File attaches were working at this point. Then somebody took Henderson's ARC, it could have been Rush it could have been Henderson, or somebody else entirely,ran ARC over toss/scans files then caused them to be delivered as a file-attach. This saved all the overhead of the FidoNet bundling. the whole world breathed a sigh of relief and now suddenly with all these files around you had to coordinate a little more highly than you do for just plain messages because the unpackers in Fidonet would just take care of the messages whereas you had to detect the presence of a an echomail bundle, unARC it, copy the messages and all that kind of junk. So a bunch of procedures and tools sprung up around what's now known as echomail. I don't know when it got called echomail. But very shortly thereafter plain old scan/toss got banned banished cause it was murder on Fidonet. There's still vestigial pieces of it left in confmail and zmail and all that stuff where you could allow or prevent inbound fidonet point to point mail to become or come from echomail. Its still useful. I mean if you have small systems that let people send messages and have it appear in echomail. Especially in small and private nets. So it needless to say utterly revolutionized Fidonet. The point to point mail was all well and fine but in fact the only people who could use it were sysops because you had to have access to that rather internal overhead message area in the fidonet and 2 because it required relatively speaking sophisticated knowledge of network topology was. You had to understand about delivery, you had to understand about other nodes and nets and all that kind of crap. With echomail you don't have to know anything. you log into a local bulletin board you don't even have to figure out for 6 months how the whole thing works. You can take part in a conversation and that's what made fidonet useful. Marge I don't know if my users are dumber than the average or not, but some of them never figure out that when they're talking in the echos they're talking to people all over the country. Tom yeah and the thing is it doesn't matter. They think gee there's an awful lot of people calling from Iowa here. That's all fine. Its like when you walk in a room and turn on a light switch I mean you don't want to have to sit through a lecture on basic electricity to do that. You want to flip the damn switch and the light go on. Marge Right! Tom Am echomail was good at that. The good thing is more people have access. The bad part is what's going on gets lost and twisted. And in the case of light switches its not a problem. In the case of echomail it gets abused and it still should require some knowledge of what's going on Marge it seems like this might be a good stopping point. How about I call you sometime next week after I've talked to a few other people and we'll resume? Tom oh sure Marge OK thanks a lot Tom that's a good idea. Marge I sure appreciate your help with this project Tom. Tom That's ok. So good luck with it. So what are you going to do with it? Marge I haven't decided yet. We're having a region 14 con in a couple of weeks and I'm going to take what I've got to the meeting and discuss it with the guys who are there. Right now I'm just collecting material. Tom yeah ok Marge so I may or may not play the tape. It depends on how many people show up. But that's as far as it goes. Anything that gets into Fidonews or gets published I'll clear with you first. Tom Ok, I do have some files just scattered at random. I was going to mail them to you I know I promised, but I haven't. Marge well if you can give me instructions on how to fTP there I can have JJ pick them up. Tom yeah well right now they're just buried in a bunch of sub-directories. I've got to go dig them out and see what's there's some stuff that's private in there. There's some stuff that's not. I just have to find the 1/2 dozen files that I just don't want they're like oh embarrissing rants between various people and personal matters that I don't want..they're just all mixed together. Marge Ok Tom then you can have the whole bag. Marge ok, great. Just let me know how to get there and one of us will pick them up. I'm working on getting an internet account one of these days. Tom oh ok yeah we'll stay in touch. Marge ok thanks a lot Tom. Tom ok bye Marge Bye