-=> Wilfred van Velzen wrote to Allen Prunty <=-

 AP> as long as the FN_SYSOP people kindly stay out of this and let us work
 AP> it out on our own.  At first all I was going to do was the minimum to
 AP> keep it on the North American Backbone

 WvV> You put way too much importance into the NAB. It only plays a minor
 WvV> part in world wide echomail distribution.

Given that FIDO started in USA That's a rather Eurocentric way of looking
at things. How much of Fido traffic is generated in the US vs, say, France,
England and Germany combined? You may be in for a bit of a shock. Not to
mention that the US is where Fido was whelped .... to wit:

Around Christmas 1983, Tom Jennings started work on a new MS-DOS-hosted
bulletin board system that would emerge as Fido BBS. Jennings set up the
system in San Francisco some time in early 1984. Another early user was
John Madil, who was trying to set up a similar system in Baltimore on his
Rainbow 100. Fido started spreading to new systems, and Jennings eventually
started keeping an informal list of their phone numbers, with Jennings
becoming #1 and Madil #2.

Jennings released the first version of the FidoNet software in June 1984.
In early 1985 he wrote a document explaining the operations of the FidoNet,
along with a short portion on the history of the system. In this version,
FidoNet was developed as a way to exchange mail between the first two Fido
BBS systems, Jennings' and Madil's, to "see if it could be done,
merely for the fun of it". This was first supported in Fido V7,
"sometime in June 84 or so"

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet

You might also be well served to look at https://www.fidonet.org/

... The closer the brewery the better the beer.

--- BBBS/Li6 v4.10 Dada-2