Did you use any of them back in the day? You would dial any of these networks to connect to different universities or to copy files or read
news or for what? I have no idea! It happened before I was born. That's
why I'm asking.
I started in IT in 1970 and we used X25 but calling it dial-up is a tad overkill.
Our implementations were 4-wire synchronous with 2 wires providing upstream and 2 wires for the downstream. Very bulky equipment until we got decent modem racks. The speeds were not gigantic ... 4800 bps to be shared by up to 8 workstations ...
As for your Fido-question, we have tried a number of things ...
Or you would pay from your own pocket to dial other countries?
you paid... that's one of the reasons for fidonet's structure... nets
were to have folks in local calling areas grouped together...
Mark knows shit of this because the Z1-world was never concerned about dialing international... Here's how it worked in this part of the free world ...
1/ In Belgium we set-up a legal non-profit entity called B-Net ... we ran a fido-style network sponsored by a bank for schools ... every school was a node in a private zone. The bank paid. As we had practically no costs (the schools dialed-out) it was like 99% profit. That money was used to pay Randy Bush 1:105/42 in the US to call and deliver whatever we wanted to a node in Belgium 2:29/777 ... as we got the mail for free, we distributed it for free to other regions on the premise they also distributed it for free. Some people didn't like the "free" part of that ... the TAP-project (Trans Atlantic Project) with Homrighausen and Jansen and their fat buddy...
Along the road we also picked-up stuff from TAP's competitor TIPTOP run by Henk Wevers and I think Michiel vander Vlist. The problem there was that Wevers' mailer Dutchie was very unstable for long connections (big files) and when a connection was lost, he did not resume but started all the way from the beginning over.
In 1995 we set up a node in the computer center of the university of Antwerp 2:292/875 and it picked-up/delivered mail and files to/from other people having access to academic networks abroad via UUCP.
By the time that ran out mid 2001 when someone at the university started wondering what that lone specific PC in the rack was doing all the time and switched it off, we had IP and Binkd thanks to the developers of the software.
2/ Internal distribution in the country was cumbersome because of ridiculous calling costs. We did the whole thing with transfering the stuff on 3 1/2 inch diskettes, We also used Bernoullie drives which were shuttled around. Sometimes by bike.
At one time we had a "Sinterklaas" node in R29 ... It only ran at night from a dedicated fax-line at my office ... no faxes at night, so ... I had a PC there with a sponsored modem-card from ZyXel which no-one knew about or even understood ... remarkable for a telco but people there had never heard about a Hayes-compatible modem. So when leaving the office the PC remained powered-on and the mailer was started on a D'Bridge implementation. It ran all night (and all week-end) until 6am about when it went to sleep as staff started to arrive. During the night it made several call-out runs, tossed mail and distributed again. All at no cost for the hobby during times of costly calls. That system ran a long time until I got a call from an engineer in telephony somewhere saying that my fax was misbehaving making ghost calls and they'd send someone to check the line. I pulled out the screwdriver, yanked the modem and put it on a pile of various cards where it wouldn't attract attention and removed the line. When the technical crew arrived to assess the situation they couldn't find anything wrong with the ... fax ... switched it off/on, tried it and concluded "it's a mistery" ... that line had been racking-up a theoretical call cost of 600.000BFr/month, which is around 15.000 Euro or US$16.700 about ... a month. But as it was he phone-company itself, nobody thought it worth to have a look at it.
After that period which lasted for quite a while, we went back to regular PSTN-calls. ISDN appeared on the horizon somewhere along the line but it really didn't take-off that well and when we had IP; only some die-hards kept using ISDN.
3/ We have done test with transmiting packages via hidden lines in a TV-screen. Overhere the screen was composed of 625 lines, but in reality there were more and sometimes these lines were used for specific applications ... TeleText was one, VideoTex was also one ... and we had the opportunity to transmit a high volume of stuff that way but it only really worked for files, unsuited for echomail/netmail... That was only downstream, upstream transmission was via a dedicated line ...
In North America they had a deal via a satellite called "Planet Connect" which kind of functioned under the same principle, but you needed a satellite dish instead of cable-TV. Maybe someone from Z1 can give details.
4/ Some countries had CSO's ... Cost Sharing Organisations ... where people chipped-in money to share the cost. I know for certain there were at least 2 of these in the Netherlands. Don't know about other countries. The idea behind a CSO was real but back in those days people also thought about making money with Fidonet and began charging more than the actual cost. Maybe people from R28 with more knowledge have a story here.
I know for certain one ZC tried to make money out of this Felix Kasza. He offered mail with a pay scheme ... actually for a while he made money and lived off it but when he got more and more unwilling 'customers' refusing to pay he slammed the door and dropped-out in no-time at all.
His successor in Z2 Ron Dwight promoted a lot Jens Mueller who started a 24-line system 2:24/24 and called it Eurostar BBS and linked in to the US star system. Him and Ron had dealings giving Ron free mail and free access to the closed ZSEGS file-distribution between the ZCs. So when Ron had been chastised by the ZCC for reasons I don't remember anymore he resigned and heavily promoted Jens as the next ZC ... that was 1994 ... I ran too with a specific campaign and won. I was a heavy supporter of free access to mail, which does not mean 'for free', and within a year and 3 months 2:24/24 canceled his lines and closed shop.
Are you OK with all of this?
Maybe I should expand this into an article for fidonews ...
\%/@rd
--- DB4 - Jan 26 2022
* Origin: Hou het veilig, hou vol. Het komt allemaal weer goed (2:292/854)