Editorial

Is the Doggie Dead?
Doug Myers

"Is the doggie dead?" asks Roy Reed in email this week. I'm at a loss to answer him. Roy has never put up a BBS, but is a strong contributor to many echoes. I formed a friendship with Roy in the BATPOWER echo, where we still enjoy trading techniques for writing old DOS batch files. Ever since I've known Roy, he's been searching for a BBS... they keep closing down around him. I believe that all the BBSes local to him shut down, and he's been teleneting to get Fido over the last year or so. I'm not sure what prompted his question this time... he may have lost another BBS to Y2K issues or he may have just noticed a decline in traffic in his favorite echoes.

But the Doggie will suffer at least a limp paw if Roy can't connect. He perches in the BATPOWER echo and watches the questions coming in. He's written some of the durndest batch solutions to sysop and user problems that I've ever seen, lending a lot of credibility that Fidonet is the place to be for help.

Is the doggie dying?" asks Kent Anderson in his article in this issue. Kent isn't in the Fidonet nodelist as he points off of Gary Craine's system, but Kent is, by any measure, a Big Man On Campus due to his moderator activities. Kent spells out the dramatic decline in listed nodes over the past few years, and wonders aloud what it all means.

I wonder what Fidonet would be like if Kent hadn't been around to guide the echoes he has. Certainly he's conducive to the doggie's health and well-being.

"Will the doggie survive?" asked John Boyer as 1999 drew to a close. John has run a BBS since the 80's, though it's been on auto-pilot for many years. John sent me netmail in December thanking me for being a reliable hub for him, and telling me that his mailer, tosser, bbs, and computer were not Y2K compliant, so he'd be shutting down on December 31st. I don't know if his nodelist segment has been deleted yet as I haven't gotten nodediffs since the new year started, but we're down one.

"Is the doggie still barking?" asks Paulette Matthews when I phoned her regarding her system. It stopped responding a couple of weeks ago, and I just wanted to see if she could use some help. Her BBS was an old Renegade version (the last one which supported the 8088). After she upgraded her mother board, though, it was impractical to upgrade her Renegade package without destroying the user data base, so she continued running the old version. Now the BBS won't initialize and needs replaced. My guess is that she probably needs the patched version of Squish, too.

I haven't removed her nodelist segment yet... I'm still a cosysop there from the old days, and I'm overdue to pay her family a visit. It won't be the first time I visited with disks in hand. We'll avoid losing one, anyway.

So how is the doggie's health? I've related the condition of a few of the folks I know, only one of which is actually gone. Sitting here, I see some sluggishness in echomail, but I don't know whether it's over Y2K problems or the aftermath of George Peace disconnecting from Fido. One netmail from zone 2 took about sixteen days to get here... but is that a sign that things are fouled up or a sign that they're clearing? I don't really know the state of the doggie... I guess it depends on how we all pull together.