Yo! Troy:
Friday June 27 1997 17:35, Troy H. Cheek wrote to Bill Cheek:
 BC>>>> FidoNet is a network.....once upon a time, one of the constituents
 BC>>>> of the Internet.  Through its own fault, it dropped out of the
 BC>>>> Internet.
 TC>>> You've stated this a couple of times before.  Aside from the
 TC>>> occasional Fidonet/Internet mail gateway, when and how exactly was
 TC>>> Fidonet part of the Internet?
 BC>> Like BitNet, MCINet, SprintNet, ArpaNet and dozens of others.
 TC> What, with interactive messaging, full-time modem connections, mainframe
 TC> computers, and sysadmins paid to take care of it all?
Huh? That doesn't matter. Fido evolved into a fairly automated dialup 
twork.
 BC>> Fido echoes were gated to the Usenet;
 TC> Last I heard, they still were.
When was the last you heard?  Oh, there's a bunch of "fido" somethings 
floating in the UseNet, but not SCANRADIO and not a lot of other echoes, 
either.  And what is there, is neither current nor complete.
 TC> Also, Usenet isn't the Internet, any more than the World Wide Web is
 TC> the Internet.
And Texas isn't the United States, either.  So what?  There isn't an Internet 
anymore in the strictest sense.  But so what?  We can still call it that.
 TC> Taking advantage of one of the many FidoInternet gateways that have
 TC> existed over the years, some of which still exist today.
They do not gate for all of Fido. Maybe for their own local nets is all.
 TC> Fidonet.org went the way of the dodo due to one (1) guy who shut
 TC> down, officially because he was tired of the headaches, but rumor has
 TC> it because the people whose mainframe he was using finally figured
 TC> out who'd been tying up the modems.
But does it matter why?  What does matter is that Fido is no longer a viable 
entity of the Internet.
 TC> I don't think one guy shutting down an unofficial service sanctioned
 TC> by neither Internet nor Fidonet can be considered the fault (or, as
 TC> you implied earlier, choice) of Fidonet.
Who cares about either fault or choice?  What matters are the action verbs 
that are conspicuously absent from Fido with respect to the Internet.
 TC> But then, I don't consider a simple mail gateway as being "part of
 TC> the Internet" to begin with.
"Consider" doesn't matter either.  But e-mail is about as Internet as 
Internet gets; like netmail is about as Fido as Fido gets.  Times were when 
every sysop in Fido had an e-mail account.....and it was little or no trouble 
to set up the Users of a BBS with a free e-mail account.
Well, the "can's" are all still there.....but the universality is long gone. 
...I'm not as good as I once was - but I am better once than I ever was...
Bill Cheek ~ bcheek@san.rr.com
Windows 95 Juggernaut Team ~ Microsoft MVP
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