Years ago I met Tom Jennings, who began the whole thing; I asked him about its (then) current state of development and he said, well, it was useful when modems were running at 2400 baud. He went on to start a magazine called Homocore which was pretty amazing - and I think he might be the moderator of the Bruce Sterling Dead Technology list - I'm not sure. You might search for him online - I'd be curious what you turn up. Not only re: Fidonet, but also the entire computer bulleten board BBS culture, which seems just about gone now - I know that Monochrome's still running in England - I check in on occasion - it's got a web base as well - Alan, sondheim@panix.com Internet text at http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt Partial at http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html Trace Projects at http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim/index.htm CDROM of collected work 1994-2002 available: write sondheim@panix.com
The culture of bbs might be leaving/dead, but the information lives on. there is a gentleman, jason scott, working on a tv documentary on bbs's, i met him at rubicon briefly and it is looking quite amazing. However, he has also put together a huge repository of textfiles from bbs's, a list of active bbs's, etc. It is a huge repository of information for this culture, could launch a few hundred theses/dissertations, if people had time to dig through it all. all of it is linked from-> http://www.textfiles.com/ more specifically the documentary information is here: http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/ -- jeremy hunsinger http://www.cddc.vt.edu/jeremy cddc/political science http://www.cddc.vt.edu 526 major williams hall 0130 http://www.dromocracy.com virginia tech -under construction blacksburg, va 24061 540-231-7614 this email was sent from my office
participants (2)
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Alan Sondheim -
jeremy hunsinger