Make: Technology on Your Time Volume 12

Make Free

THE GREAT, PERVERSE JOY OF STEAMPUNK

By Cory Doctorow

TOM JENNINGS IS A SKINNY, PIERCED, and tattooed DIY engineer in his early fifties, a self-described “queer punk.” In 1984 he launched FidoNet, a way for dial-up bulletin board systems (BBSes) to pass messages back and forth. FidoNet let each BBS spool up messages for other BBSes, then phone in whenever rates were cheapest to pass them on.

FidoNet nodes passed messages on to other nodes to be delivered further down the line, in a robust and elegant fashion, so that messages could be delivered to almost anywhere in the world for free. (The alternative? Telegrams, expensive longdistance voice calls, or leased lines).

I first met Jennings long after the founding of FidoNet, at a conference ...