Volume 6, Number 30 24 July 1989 +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | _ | | / \ | | /|oo \ | | - FidoNews - (_| /_) | | _`@/_ \ _ | | International | | \ \\ | | FidoNet Association | (*) | \ )) | | Newsletter ______ |__U__| / \// | | / FIDO \ _//|| _\ / | | (________) (_/(_|(____/ | | (jm) | +---------------------------------------------------------------+ Editor in Chief: Vince Perriello Editors Emeritii: Dale Lovell Thom Henderson Chief Procrastinator Emeritus: Tom Jennings FidoNews is published weekly by the International FidoNet Association as its official newsletter. You are encouraged to submit articles for publication in FidoNews. Article submission standards are contained in the file ARTSPEC.DOC, available from node 1:1/1. 1:1/1 is a Continuous Mail system, available for network mail 24 hours a day. Copyright 1989 by the International FidoNet Association. All rights reserved. Duplication and/or distribution permitted for noncommercial purposes only. For use in other circumstances, please contact IFNA at (314) 576-4067. IFNA may also be contacted at PO Box 41143, St. Louis, MO 63141. Fido and FidoNet are registered trademarks of Tom Jennings of Fido Software, 164 Shipley Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94107 and are used with permission. We don't necessarily agree with the contents of every article published here. Most of these materials are unsolicited. No article will be rejected which is properly attributed and legally acceptable. We will publish every responsible submission received. Table of Contents 1. EDITORIAL ................................................ 1 The Resignation of David Dodell .......................... 1 2. ARTICLES ................................................. 3 Thoughts ................................................. 3 A Response to Doug Thompson & jim nutt ................... 7 Democracy...Is it for you? ............................... 11 Democracy in Fidonet? Ramblings of a madman .............. 14 An open letter from Dan Steurer .......................... 16 3. WANTED ................................................... 17 Investment Echo .......................................... 17 4. LATEST VERSIONS .......................................... 18 And more! FidoNews 6-30 Page 1 24 Jul 1989 ================================================================= EDITORIAL ================================================================= Here's something you might not have seen yet, if you don't read the comments published in the weekly nodediff: [start of quote] This is perhaps one of the saddest notices I have written in the nodediff. I have tended my resignation as the International Coordinator of Fidonet to the FidoNet Zone Council. I will be staying on in the position to facilitate the smooth transistion to the next IC, however I will not be hearing any policy complaints at this time. In other words, I will stay as long as it takes to get a successor in place, and will do what is necessary to keep the network technically operational, anything else will need to wait until the next IC is installed. For the reasons why, this will be expounded in an article in FidoNews sometime in the next month. Ignore the rumors that I'm sure that will start up as soon as word starts spreading. Nobody is authorized to claim that a certain event, individual or anything else caused my resignation. I was not forced or asked by anyone to resign. I did this because I needed a break from the administrative workings of the network, and wanted to start devoting my time and energy into some of my favorite projects. [end of quote] That's right, folks. David Dodell has stepped down from his position as International Coordinator. Friends of David, don't weep for him. He's done his best. Now it's time for someone else to do the job. And it's time for David to devote some time to his personal interests, which have been neglected far too long. That includes his lovely wife, Amy. Enemies of David, don't rejoice over some apparent victory. You've won NOTHING. Until we all recognize that we're in the middle of wars that will result in total unity or total destruction, and we're all pointed towards unity, nothing can be gained through anyone's arrival or departure from the stage. I personally wanted David to resign some time ago. But it had nothing to do with power trips or anything. I thought that he had had enough. That he should take up his life again. Let someone else deal with this stuff. At one point, he was very close to doing just that. I still think it unfortunate that he decided to continue then. Just as I am happy for him now. FidoNews 6-30 Page 2 24 Jul 1989 This job I have as FidoNews editor can often be very painful. The worst part, however, has been printing articles accusing David of being on some kind of "power trip". Nothing could be further from the truth. David is just not that kind of person. What has been true, throughout, is that David has a vision of what he has wanted FidoNet to be. It's a nice vision. One that we could all share. What also has been true is that David has a vision of how that needs to be accomplished. I don't completely share that vision. Many don't share it at all. It has to do with centralized authority and unquestioned leadership. But what that meant was that as long as David held power, he had to exercise it. Hence the apparent "power trip". Sorry if this disillusions some of you folks, but David only used the power because he thought he had to, not because he was drunk with it. I can't say that FidoNet will be a better place because of David. Right now it looks like the jury is out on what it will be. But whether you want to believe it or not, it would almost certainly would have been a worse place without David. The next person to hold this job has my sympathy in advance. Best of luck, David. And THANKS!! ----------------------------------------------------------------- FidoNews 6-30 Page 3 24 Jul 1989 ================================================================= ARTICLES ================================================================= Thoughts By Butch Walker, 161/2 As August draws near, I wanted to give you some thoughts, and some history. What follows will not become an epic, nor will it be repeated around campfires, but maybe will give you some perspective. My first experience with Computer Tele-communications was in 1978. I had formed a Pension Administration company with an Attorney and a CPA. We needed to communicate with a mainframe, so we purchased a Dec LA36. Basically a dumb terminal (keyboard, line printer, and 300 baud modem with an acoustic coupler). That was okay for a while but it was slow and expensive. Everything was entered on line, real time. In 1979 I personally spent $20,000 for a CPT 8000, which consisted of a 48k 8080, 2 8" floppies, keyboard, monitor, internal 300 baud modem, special Diablo letter quality printer, dual sheet feeders, etc. Man all that power in one location. [grin] In 1980, I sold my agency, my share in the PA firm, and my share in a partnership and took a position that brought me to California. With me came my CPT. Late 1980 or early 1981, CPT released a CP/M disk for the machine and it became a data processor. I and a couple of others started writing programs in CBasic for our company. The CPT was in Oakland and I lived in Clayton, so I decided to get a micro for the house. After months of shopping I purchased mail order an S100 machine with 64k, two 1.2mb 8" floppies, CRT, and a 300 baud modem card. All for the amazingly low price of $3,800. At night I'd put BYE.COM up on the CPT and if I needed something I'd pull it off. I also called a few CP/M boards both locally and back in Michigan. Boy, what a deal! By 1984 it was obvious that IBM and the clones were here to stay. Also, the S100 machine was on it's last legs. Parts were impossible to find, nothing was standardized, and I was tired of trying to do the repair work myself, so I bought a Leading Edge Model M, plus an expansion chassis, a 10mb hrad drive and a 5mb Syquest removable cartridge drive. Boy I was in heaven, 640k of ram, two 360k floppies, and 15mb of hard disk storage all for only $6,500. I also bought a Hayes 1200 internal modem. It was now the big time folks. [grin] In the fall of 1985 I needed to set up a bulletin board for a users group. I looked at RBBS, PC-Board, and several others. Mike Kelleher was running Fido. After talking to Mike, reading the docs, it seemed that Fido provided the answer to the problem. In October of 1985 I brought up a one line Fido at 1200 baud. At that time only Nets 125 & 143 existed in the Bay Area. I applied for a node number, but was told I'd have to apply as a regional FidoNews 6-30 Page 4 24 Jul 1989 independant as I was too far away from from either net. So 10/625 TBLUG came up in November of 1985. By January of '86 I went to two lines. My company bought an IBM AT, which I took up to 8mhz, I added a JRam AT card and brought up Multilink, put on two Courier 2400's and away we went. Well, some of the time anyway. Multilink loved to hang. Sometimes I thought the system was down more than it was up. My wife used to hate it when I tried to loggon from home only to discover the system was hung. Away I'd go to the office, regardless of the time of day or night. In February, Mike Kelleher told me to log on to Harv's board and check out something called echomail. At that time echomail involved a few boards in Dallas and Harv in San Francisco. Mike and I both jumped on the bandwagon. Ah the early days. Mucho bugs in scanmail and tossmail. Thousands of dupes, processing mail by hand using Fido's external mail event. Arcing it ourselves, manually uploading it, unarcing it and processing manually. Detroit (my brother Don) coming on line, then Tampa (Wes Cowley), Atlanta (Ken Shackleford), New York/New Jersey (Gee Wong), New Hampshire (Bob Hartman), Cleveland (Phil Ardussi). Aha, the first echomail backbone. In the spring of '86 it was apparent that there were quite a few regional independants in the East Bay, and the valley that might want to form a net. I decided to see what could be done, and Net 161 came into being. Due to geography it made a great deal of sense to set up hubs from the beginning, so Mike Kelleher wrote another WalkBro & Kelleher almost useful utility to create hub routing files. Mike and I set up the routing and a few of the pioneers met in Fairfield to organize the net. In September of '86 the echomail backbone was formalized. We had a meeting in Chicago specifically for that purpose. My brother Don and Mike Bader came over from Detroit, Phil Ardussi from Cleveland, Jon Sabol from Dallas, Bob Hartman from New Hampshire, Gee Wong and Thom Henderson from New Jersey. Topology was mapped, the idea of an echomail policy was discussed, 84 commercials for SeaDog were listened too [grin], Arcmail was fine tuned, and Opus was discussed (we were already beta testing it at the time). Heck I even paid Hartman for Renum. It was about the same time that we took the Net161 echo regional for all NorCal nets. Probably the first ever. It was a fun and exciting time. The net was growing by leaps and bounds, Fidonet was growing, echomail was booming, other than mikey, IFNA, and a few other things fun times were had by all. The Dobyns Award was created and handed out with vigor. FidoNews 6-30 Page 5 24 Jul 1989 In the summer of '87 my office burnt to the ground, taking the echomail distribution machine with it. Four hours later, my home system was moving the echomail once again. Only a handful of messages were never disributed. A few months later, due to an error in judgement, I got appointed Zone 1 Echomail Coordinator. Boy, I really had no idea what I was getting into, but someone needed to do it. In the early summer of '88 I decided it was time to let someone else have the fun of being net host, and conned Diane Smith into taking over. Again Net 161 made Fidonet history as Diane was the first female host ever. August of '88 brought Fidocon, and I had been conned by my other brother Mark into speaking. For a while it looked as if I wasn't going to make it. But finally I took a redeye into Cinci and arrived there early in the morning. Heck I can't even remember if it was Thursday or Friday. That night we went until 5:00am working on compromises on an echomail policy, maybe I only made it until 3am, shoot I don't remember. All I know is that I was one tired camper. I gave two talks, one on Multitasking and BBS's, and one on Echomail. Last winter enough was enough, and I resigned as ZEC. I decided it was time for someone else to wear the target on their back, and I would retire to being a normal (if there is such a thing) sysop. Late December through late January brought more changes in my personal life, and now I prepare to move to Cleveland Ohio and return to school after a 20 year absence. While I still plan on being in Fidonet (I'm already in the nodelist in Net 157), my role will be a very minor one. I'd like to think I accomplished some good. Net 161 has spun off three nets (203, 205 & 208) and helped start a fourth (204). I think Net 161 has helped set an example of how a net can function without