Re: <nettime> To-morrow the Minitel! (!)

[robert adrian <rax@alien.mur.at>]

Hello Tjebbe

Am 10.06.2014 um 13:24 schrieb Tjebbe van Tijen:

> you focus on art-projects using telecom... which was not my intend.

In your original Nettime mail you wrote :

> In the years 1988/1989 we were organising in Amsterdam a
> congregation from radical publishers, performers and groups from all
> over Europe from Russia to the British isles, from Norway to Spain:
> Europe Against The Current.

This sounded to me like a description of art or art-related projects.  
No?
-----------

> Also  we have forgotten here to mention the FIDO (dial-up network)  
> which was fully alive and had some kind of a global span at that  
> time. The bottom up node system may be an inspiration for  
> independent data-communication in our times, by combining it with  
> short wave radio.

FIDO is a protocol for networking Bulletin Board Systems. Tom  
Jennings claimed that in the 90s there were something like 35000 BBS  
servers worldwide using the FIDO protocol. Unfortunately the network  
depended on normal telephone connection (meaning normal long distance  
charges) so that the system was never really global ...  
intercontinental traffic was simply too costly.
The Internet changed all that and in the early 90s many BBSs were  
struggling to build "gateways" to the Internet (mostly via university  
servers) when it became clear that the "Network of Networks" was the  
answer to the problem - global connection for the price of a local  
phonecall. Some succeeded but most failed ... but that's another story.

In late 1994 the Internet/WWW became available for everybody with a  
computer, modem and telephone. Pre-history was over!

best

robert
======================
robert adrian
<http://alien.mur.at/rax/>


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