Dear Martin, you made me reflect several days on your words... 
 
 > mr: I think, its time now replacing fido with something like a 
 > mr: "independent internet user network" :-) 
 
 You're making fun out of it, but I do believe that's after all 
 what Fidonet is already... and in particular for people like 
 we usually find Meadow'ing :-) 
 
 In the past years I had some moments of incredible frustration, 
 but now they're gone. I only hope we're able to keep this group, 
 with this spirit that has been keeping us together. It took us 
 years and years to grow this "thing" we have and it's not easy 
 to make us go away. Just look to how many still pop up regularly 
 although they don't run the bird anymore... 
  
 Most of the ones that really left (I mean "stopped reading and 
 posting at Meadow") did it because few reasons, e.g. 
  - no condition to keep being a real "mirror shades" sysop,  
    either because of professional life or family 
  - querels, usually motivated by different views on how to 
    save Opus and "WOC" 
  - need to have a bigger/easier to mantain/whatever system 
  
 The only names from Opus golden days still nodelisted (as far as 
 I could check Jon Morby and Trev Roydhouse) are not here because 
 some of the reasons above. Moreover, it seems that nobody will 
 have the chance to resume the Penguin development cycle. 
 And we all know that for long time, don't we? 
 
 So, what's really our glue? What are really our secrets hopes? 
 I suspect there are still a lot of areas for us to experiment, 
 play, talk about, help each other (after all, this is only a 
 hobby *indeed*), even if sooner or later we'll add new software 
 to our systems and one day Opus 1.73 won't be able to keep pace 
 with that. So what? No matter how it goes, we still can experi- 
 ment, play, talk about, help each other! 
 Maybe we  should try to talk about this :-) 
   -FC- 
--- Opus-CBCS 1.73a
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