I was 2:201/274.9. My upstream node that I connected to was 2:201/274. He connected to his upstream hub, 2:201/200, who in turn connected to his upstream net coordinator, 2:201/0, whose upstream was the regional coordinator, 2:20/0, and finally up to the zone coordinator, who I think was 2:0/0 or something.
A zone was a continent, 2 was Europe. Regions were countries in Europe, 20 was Sweden. Each region could have any number of networks, Sweden had like 5, and network 1 was the Stockholm area. Each network had hubs and nodes, and the guy who ran the node I talked to was simply the 74th node of the 2nd hub. Finally, since I didn't have a public BBS, I was a private point, the 9th on my node.
So putting it all together, a Fidonet address is zone:regionnetwork/hubnode.point.
Why weren't there separator characters between the region and the networks, or the hub and the nodes? Who knows, it worked. :-)
> Why weren't there separator characters between the region and the networks, or the hub and the nodes? Who knows, it worked. :-)
Because the original scheme didn't account for these intermediate levels. 2:201/274 was supposed to talk to 2:201/0, which was supposed to talk to 2:0/0.
Doesn't scale, so they introduced the 10^n scheme for subdivision (whose precise limits differed between zones)
I was just a little bit too young to get access to BBS in my youth.