Hello Terry,

On Wednesday June 10 2020 15:01, you wrote to me:

 MVDV>> QWK/BW was never popular ere and AFAIK was never used by points.
                                 ^
 MVDV>> (I ave been the R28 Point Coordinator since 1996 or so.)
           ^
Your software has stripped the hex 8D.

 MVDV>> In 1996 R28 had some 5500 registered points.

 TR> That is very interesting, do you know why this was the case? Language
 TR> maybe?

Language was not the issue I think. Pointing was not only popular in The
Netherlands, it was popular in all of Europe. At the height of Fidonet there
were over half a million points listed in the Z2 pointlist. The pointlist was a
voluntairty thing. Some point sysops choose not to be in it. So there may have
been more than half a million.

I'd say the introdcution of metered local calls was the main trigger for the
BBS users to become points. And oh yes, calls in the middle of the night were
cheaper, so they could configure their system to poll the boss node in the
cheap time. On the other side side of the fence, sysops would encouarage their
BBS users to become points because points only kept the line for minutes
instead of hours. So that sysops could do more with less lines. 
Plus that once having experienced pointing the majority never wanted to go back
to reading and writing messages via a BBS. In the Netherlands BBS users became
an extinct species. The last one was spotted in the wild around 1996.

 TR> When I left Fidonet Philippines we had 3 points only and one of them I
 TR> know became a sysop later.

One out of three ain't bad I'd say. ;)  here the pool of points was a breeding
ground for new sysops. After the early nineties it was very unusual to have new
sysops that hadn't started out as a point. I myself started out as a point too.


Cheers, Michiel

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