| > I ran a local NNTP relay on my home phone back in the day. Another thing that was sometimes done for BBSes was setting yourself up as a 'point node': > As the number of messages in Echomail grew over time, it became very difficult for users to keep up with the volume while logged into their local BBS. Points were introduced to address this, allowing technically-savvy users to receive the already compressed and batched Echomail (and Netmail) and read it locally on their own machines.[23] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet#Points This was obviated a bit with the creation of offline news readers (e.g., BlueWave): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_(file_format) The equivalent to QWK for Usenet were SOUP files: * https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Simple_Offline_USENET_Packet_Fo... * http://www.faqs.org/faqs/off-line-readers/usenet/intro/ |
It's all been downhill since then