FidoNet was my first network. I still remember the sysops and the parties.
An interesting aspect is that it was impossible to obtain an address without providing some service or newsletter on a specific subject to the sysop in return, so it was a privilege to have your own FidoNet address.
> it was impossible to obtain an address without providing some service or newsletter on a specific subject to the sysop in return
Huh? Not when I joined in my region. I didn't have to provide anything.
I was 14, but the BBS owner and mostly old guy heavy metal user base only found out when I later showed up at their annual user group meeting - and we had lots of fun (and drinks) together! They even took me clubbing later with a fake ID, and I woke up heavily wasted in the BBS owner's student apartment and we had microwaved frozen pizza together. Fun times.
The most surprising thing about early and mid-80s hobbyist computer culture (BBSes, users groups, etc) is despite being so open, egalitarian and easy to join, more than half of everyone you'd meet would be someone cool, interesting and worth knowing. I still have several close friends who I met in those days through random computer clubs. All of my little group of friends went on to have fairly notable careers involved in cool computer products, projects or companies you've probably heard of. And over the decades, many others that I'd hung out with at early user's groups and local computer shows became notable enough to follow their adventures in industry magazines.
I don't think that was just a fluke of random luck. I suspect early 8-bit hobby computing (especially outside universities) was an almost perfect gating filter. Nothing was very easy, little was well documented and frankly, it wasn't yet all that much fun. While there was some fun to be had, there were always bits of barbed wire and broken glass to crawl over first, whether typing in BASIC listings from a poorly printed 'zine (inevitably with a few misprints to debug), or figuring out at which volume level software might load from finicky cassette tapes. And even when you got something to finally work, the fun came in short bursts before the next cryptic barrier would arise.
The experience never quite lived up to what we'd imagined owning a hobby computer would be like while we were saving up our pennies to buy our own. But we persevered, driven forward by the sunk cost, brief interludes of fun and faith that tons of 'awesome' lay just ahead. The lack of relevant information beyond a few monthly magazines forced early hobbyists to find each other in ad hoc user's groups and then via BBSes. When I got my 4K, 800 Khz, 8-bit personal computer in 1981, no other person in my entire extended family's social circles knew anyone else who owned a computer at home. Even the concept sounded as strange as owning a "personal cement truck". The first question was always, "A what...?" followed by "Why?" So, despite being just a teenager, my desperation for information forced me to start a user's group simply for lack of there being any in my area. And it quickly grew to several hundred members despite my ineptitude and lack of experience at... well, anything. It turns out, the hearty souls both enthusiastic and naive enough to buy a computer for a hobby in those days, then persevere through failure and continue to connect with other lost users - ended up filtering for some unique qualities.
While the instant global connection (and gratification) of the web is amazing and immensely powerful, one thing we've perhaps lost along the way is that kind natural filter.
There was a minimum level of stability you needed in your life at that time to be able to own a computer and pay the phone bills needed back then (I came later in the mid 90s-00s but it wasn't too much different by then.) Kids needed parents who had that stability, and most of those parents probably kept a decent eye on their kids. Even then, I remember some real characters in the computing scene from when I was a kid.
Now you can have crippling health issues and still post on the internet. In fact, you're probably more inclined to spend time online if interacting with the offline world is so tough. This was much harder from '85-05.
> There was a minimum level of stability you needed in your life at that time to be able to own a computer...
True. I was fortunate to grow up middle-class in suburban California with a college grad dad and stay-at-home mom. Still, I had to mail-order my 4K computer to get it for $400 instead of the $500 MSRP, and even that was a BIG ask. By far the most expensive single thing my parents had ever bought for me. I had to settle for a Radio Shack Color Computer, even though I desperately wanted a Commodore 64. The C64's $600 MSRP was just too much to even consider suggesting and I didn't even dream of an $800 Atari 800 (but I do now own every 1980s Atari, Apple, Commodore and Sinclair computer). :-)
Turns out, that Coco was accidentally perfect for me because the CPU wasn't the usual 6502 or Z80 but the unique Motorola 6809, a true 8/16 hybrid (the same way the later, very similar, 68000 was a 16/32 bit hybrid). The 6809 was far more powerful per clock than the 6502 or Z80 and had a huge, orthogonal "PDP-ish" ISA with dual stacks, multiple 16-bit index registers and maskable interrupts enabling advanced code that was position-independent, re-entrant and multi-tasking. But the trade off was the Coco was all CPU and no dedicated graphics or sound chips, so the screen was memory mapped and we had to move each pixel on every frame with only the CPU.
So, never having touched a computer before and starting from zero with no help, I had to first teach myself BASIC from the Radio Shack's manual and then how to push the hell out of that sweet 16-bit CPU with highly-optimized, hand-coded assembler. It took years and was painfully slow and difficult. But it turns out the brutal discipline of cycle-counting down to the metal while racing the CRT beam every 63.5 microseconds was the best foundation imaginable for my future. A future I had no way of knowing would include the Amiga 1000 in 1985, on to 2D graphics, real-time broadcast video, 3D rendering (including working on new movies and shows in the science fiction franchises that shaped my childhood) and being there for the birth of the first GPUs. Not being able to afford the computer I wanted and having to teach myself computing due to flunking out of college, led directly to a multi-decade career as a serial tech entrepreneur. So, bad grades, early failure and stumbling along with no coherent plan can occasionally work out surprisingly well.
> some real characters in the computing scene
Oh, yes indeed. I had to sneak into my first couple Comdex, CES and NCC trade shows due to being too young, not 'in the trade' AND being broke. But I met (and partied with) OG legends like John Draper (Cap'n Crunch), young Bill Gates, even younger Steve Jobs, and a whole zoo of eccentric characters including a guy who legally changed his name to R2D3, and a guy who dressed like Gandalf every day. Of course, these days there's a clerk at the local UPS store who wears a Gryffindor cape daily but in the mid-80s that stuff was wild for a suburban kid. But as I said in my first post, nearly everyone I met in 80s computing was interesting, worth knowing, and usually happy to help a random kid who wasn't interesting OR worth knowing.