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FidoNet was a simply wonderful innovation, and it was a reflection of the creativity of its author - Tom Jennings - and his views of community and identity. htt
by rozzie 6mo ago
FidoNet was a simply wonderful innovation, and it was a reflection of the creativity of its author - Tom Jennings - and his views of community and identity.
https://grokipedia.com/page/tom_jennings https://grokipedia.com/page/tom_jennings
Tom was working on FidoNet in 1984, the same time my Iris co-founders and I had begun work on what became Lotus Notes. Architecturally, those of us who were working on collaborative systems in that era were shaped by the decentralized architecture of USEnet - inspired and motivated by the observation that a community could be brought together by something technologically as simple as uucp.
Both dial-up focused, Tom took this in the direction of a decentralized BBS, while I took it in the direction of masterless replicated nosql databases we called 'notefiles'. Identity being at the core, Tom was focused more on public community while we focused on private collaboration.
It was such an exciting time for emergent decentralization, shaped by a strong dose of 60's idealism.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21670035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21670035
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hackers_Conference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hackers_Conference
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Compute...
https://www.stevenlevy.com/crypto https://www.stevenlevy.com/crypto
- andsoitis 6mo ago> Tom Jennings - and his views of community and identity. https://grokipedia.com/page/tom_jennings https://grokipedia.com/page/tom_jennings Human version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Jennings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Jennings
- thatxliner 6mo ago[flagged]
- andsoitis 6mo agoPossible. Their HN profile claims they’re Ray Ozzie, which I find hard to believe. https://keybase.io/rozzie https://keybase.io/rozzie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Ozzie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Ozzie
- tclancy 6mo agoTheir account that has been posting for over 15 years and has made numerous comments with real insight into the times under discussion? I know it's necessary to have a healthy bit of skepticism when being on the Internet but I think we could agree this is one of the weirdest, longest, dumbest cons in the history of confidence games if this is not Ray Ozzie. HN has a fairly wide group of "famous" contributors like Woz, etc.
- andsoitis 6mo agoRight, which is why my first instinct was to write “possible”. If it is you, Ray: I thought your creations Lotus Notes and Groove were phenomenal!!
- blast 6mo agoWhen did Woz post here? I'd love to see that.
- tclancy 6mo agoI might be thinking of Metafilter, where he commented for a while. Could have sworn he commented on something here.
- Cyphase 6mo agoSure looks legit based on the linked Keybase, Twitter, and GitHub.
- whalesalad 6mo agoA bot can't have a keybase, twitter, and github account?
- Cyphase 6mo agoI didn't say because those accounts exist, I said based on them.