Tales of Fidonet: The SF Echo

[tbutler]

(I've been putting this off hoping to find my lost archive of Fidonet messages, but so far it's still missing. :( I did find an online copy of the Acronym List, though... )

Back before the Internet and Internet newsgroups were open to the general public, those of us who couldn't get it (or who were university grads going through withdrawal) had Fidonet. Fidonet forums/message boards/etc. were called Echoes; I hung out on the Fidonet SF Echo.



The SF Echo was moderated by David Dyer-Bennett, one of the loose conflagration of Minnesota SF fans known as the Minneapolis Mafia; his loose but effective style was generally very effective for keeping things running and the signal-to-noise ratio good while still maintaining a 'friends and family' vibe. Conversation there was generally intelligent, the regular participants were charming and witty, flamewars very rare and quickly snuffed out. A lot of cool people hung out there, including a lot of midlist SF/Fantasy authors. (The MM and the Scribblies had a fairly large representation.)

I still miss them. :(

Comments

[yhlee]

I miss Fidonet too, although ironically I had no involvement with the SF echo (I don't even remember whether it was one of the ones available to me). I was active on RECFRP, DND, ADND, WRITING, and MILHIST--you can see my bias. :p I miss the MILHIST echo particularly. They were very nice to an irritating teenager like me.

[tbutler]

I spent a little time on WRITING, partly because I was trying (and failing) to write, partly because there were a couple of writers there that I liked and who didn't hang out on SF.

[yhlee]

I think I was on WRITING around 1996-7. You?

(I was more active on the RPG-related echoes, mainly because questions like whether THAC0 represented damage reduction or avoidance of damage were agonizingly important to me as a teenager. *snort*)

[tbutler]

I'm not sure. '97-98 was around when I dropped off Fidonet; the local sysop where I got my Fido feed had shut down, I was having real trouble finding an alternate, and frankly traffic was starting to drop off as more and more people got access to the Internet and USENET. (That was also around the time I started getting really active on the FFML (anime fanfic mailing list), since I'd gotten dial-up Internet access in '95.)

I suspect I would have been mostly lurking at that point, if I'd been active; I remember making a fool of myself, and wasn't having much success anyway. On the FFML, it turned out I was a much better editor than writer, though I did manage to be a little creative by doing MST-style reviews.

[yhlee]

I dropped off after 1997 because I went to college, made a cursory look for a BBS that I didn't have to pay for, had limited luck, and then life got eaten up by problem sets and boyfriend and an actual games club. (Up until then I had only been able to play tabletop games with my sister.)

Mmm, anime fanfic. I regret that I didn't re/discover that until much later--I read two things in college (a Rurouni Kenshin Kenshin/Kaoru fic on some Geocities shrine, and Children of an Elder God) and that was it.