FV>> On a technical basis, Fidonet should operate as
FV>> follows.... One Zone and one Net. When that Net
FV>> becomes full, start another Net. Fill

 EH>> Didn't you just say "one zone and one net"?

 EH>> I've got a better idea: 64bit integers.

 EH>> Your net numbers will _never_ run out, unless
 EH>> air particles themselves start getting IP
 EH>> addresses.

 FV> True, but not within Fidonet specs... I think.

you forgot the word "current" in there... "current fidonet
specs"... in the beginning, fidonet addressing was "flat"...
then, as it grew, they went to net/node addressing... in don't know if
regions or zones came next but regional addressing was never instituted...
and also, at some point in there, point addresses were created and
maintained by a "central authority"... this also led to pointnets
where a point system had a node number just like a normal fullnode but the
net address was greater than 32000 (IIRC)... a pointnet was assigned to a
specific node and thus conversion was easy to go to zone:net/node.point...

ie: if pointnet 45678 was assigned to 1:3634/12
    1:45678/42 == 1:3634/12.42

pointnet addresses were not allowed to appear on the outside of the
pointnet... the above was a form of zonegating... i guess it would more
accurately be called netgating >

there have been a lot of changes over the years... i remember my first
multinode bbs setup... i configured each node as a seperate point address,
thus, if you saw mail from blah:blah/blah.1, you knew it was from node 1,
mail from blah:blah/blah.45 was from node 45... since that software was
limited to 255 nodes, my methods caused me to list point systems starting
at 300... at one time, i was managing/hosting some 150 point systems and
something like 40 or 50 nodes on the bbs...

)\/(ark