Letters to the Editor

• Who's Out There Lurking?
• Why Not Cockroaches?

Who's Out There Lurking?
philip@crookes.org

Doug,

Here's an e-mail I wrote in reply to Lesley-Dee's article in the last issue of Snooze. As you'll see, I used to be a Fido sysop, now I just browse the Snooze and wonder what if? As I noted to Lesley-Dee, you too may do what you will with these words, in a spectrum ranging from pulling the chain to publishing far and wide. Whatever you do will be right.

Incidentally, did you know that the richest man in New Zealand is called Doug Myers?

the words follow

Lesley-Dee

Like you, like many, I used to be in FidoNet. I joined up somewhere in the mid to late 80s, first as 2:253/197, later as 2:250/102 and later still as a node in the German Zone 24 but I forgot the number.

At its peak I ran Merkinstead, a UK and later German BBS that scored upwards of 10,000 hits a month for its mix of attitude, e-mail, echoes, a real mean AI engine, downloads delivered by a Hairy Protocol and (then the wonder of the age) a unique online interface to the broadcast database that is European teletext.

So why stop?

I moved house, country and job. I became less and less patient with tiny-minded men with names like Keith Wassell and Ron Dwight (back then respectively *Cs in Region 25 and Zone 2). It's no coincidence that *C sounds-like STASI - the acronym of the loathsome East German spying & secret police outfit.

I miss the great cameraderie - the monthly meets at the Barleycorn pub in West Didsbury in Manchester, England; the phone calls about some new discovery; the shared purchases of new exciting gear.

The fact that when I joined Fido a sysop called Phil Burden could be bothered to put up with my 13 unsuccessful attempts to e-mail his system before I got it right... and then he replied with the desired node number.

There was the time that Dave Thorpe found somewhere somehow the close-out stock of some company and we all bought unimagineably big 192 MB hard disks. And wondered how we could ever fill them with downloads and gateway programs.

The time I got hold of a CD ROM drive and managed to belabor it into working with my Amstrad PC1512 computer with its 8086 CPU and incredible 640K of RAM to create what I boasted was 'one of Fido's biggest file troughs'. It probably wasn't but the files.bbs list alone was 100K long...

The very first time someone called my BBS, pulled the rope to ring the bell and as the rope came away in their hand was greeted by our Butler: 'a tall, cadaverous man who sways slightly as he welcomes you to the House. Some people say he drinks so much because he has forgotten his Real Name - or is it just that he has forgotten his Name because he drinks so much?"

I miss the shared pleasure of devising new toys for the BBS. The great spirit of discovery that led John Clempner to write and present to Merkinstead the software to display teletext (a closed captioning database of about 20 MB per tv channel) without even seeing the tv card in my computer. Or Simon Dowson, who created the AI engine that allowed our online Ngaire to give astonishingly believable answers to caller's questions - and even led one unfortunate lovesick lad to call the house line and insist to my astonished wife that she must allow him to pledge his troth to the lovely Ngaire at once!

Merkinstead.com will, one day soon, reappear on the Internet, together with radio station 2BGR (for Bloody Good Radio) which I don't suppose we could ever have achieved with the Fido technology of the time. And when it does, no whining weasel Wassells, no drivelling dweebly Dwights, will tell me what to put up, which messages I may carry, who I may allow to come onto my property. And if Keith Wassell or Ron Dwight don't like these words, I invite them or any other *C to discuss the question with me keyboard to keyboard at philip@crookes.org. Attorneys at thirty paces!

Fido's strength was its friendship, anarchy, common purpose and shared sense of exploration. Its weakness was and is the whole crap and bullshit of Policy - (since when does English give capital letters to plain ornery words?) and the unnecessary power structure inherent in the *C system. Fido needs exactly as much Policy as does the Internet. No less, no more. But it won't happen because the boys won't let go of the toys until one day the nursery will be empty and no-one will care any more. If anyone cares now.

So long as anyone can de-list a Fido node, Fido is doomed. So long as the Nodelist entry is conditioned on anything other than purely technical grounds, Fido will die. Because even though I pay people money for my DNS listing, nobody is telling me what I may do with it. Not to mention that the Internet is bigger, better connected, cheaper to do and more fun.

You're free to do what you like with this outpouring of sentimentality and drivel. Print it, dump it, shred it, feed it to the cat. Even put it through Merkinstead's Mincing Machine (tho it may well hit you with its handbag if you do!)

But, like Fido used to be and stopped being, it was fun while it lasted.

Philip

Why Not Cockroaches?
Andrei Fomenko 2:5041/14.8

In the FIDONEWS echo, Andrei questions the use of ASCII cows in the comix section...

AF> Why cows? What about goats or cockroaches? :)

DM> No one knows how to draw them :(

 \ /
 -o-
 -o-  AF>  Such a..... an insect lives
 -o-            in my appartment #8-[ ]
 -o-
 -o-  AF>  Bleah! BUT, once I saw it
 -o-            eating a cockroach :) I
 -o-
 -o-  AF>  mean IT was eating a cockroach,
 -o-            NOT me:)
  |
 / \

DM> Keep it. It's kinda like keeping a cat to control the rats :)