← all stories
1984–todayalive, 1,233 nodes · peak 39,688 (1995)

FidoNet

A worldwide network of electronic bulletin boards of the 1980s and 1990s with no single company, no money, and no servers of its own: thousands of independent operators bought their own modems, called each other at night for the cheap rate, and worked out the rules among themselves. The peak was 39,688 nodes at the end of 1995; the network did not die, it shrank, and it is alive to this day (1,233 nodes worldwide in 2026).

Founders Tom Jennings · John Madill
Domains fidonet.org
pre-internetbbsdecentralized-networkvolunteer-communityussr-growth

In brief

FidoNet is a worldwide network of electronic bulletin boards that never had a company, a bank account, or a single server. It grew out of a hobby program the programmer Tom Jennings wrote for his own BBS in San Francisco, and it turned into a network when he dialed up an acquaintance in Baltimore. The peak was 39,688 nodes at the end of 1995, and the decline began after that, though not everywhere and not at the same time: in the former USSR the network kept growing for another five years, and from 2002 to 2009 it held more than half of all the nodes in the world. FidoNet did not die: in 2026 there are 1,233 nodes worldwide, 414 of them in the former USSR.

How it started (the founders)

Tom Jennings was testing the link between his own BBS (Fido #1, San Francisco) and John Madill's BBS (Fido #2, Baltimore) in the spring of 1984, reaching the seventh version of the program by June. The network started working in 1984, and three independent primary sources confirm that; the exact year in which the single-computer Fido program was written, before the network existed, is not named separately by any source we found (see "Discrepancies"). Jennings described the project as a hobby from the start: "totally supported by it's users and sysops, and in many ways is similar to ham radio," a business in no sense at all.

Growth outran what one person could administer: from ~2 nodes in the spring to ~50 by September 1984 and 160+ by the beginning of 1985. Errors in the list of nodes ("every single week without fail there was at least one wrong number") were the norm until August 1984, a matter of months after the start, when Jennings handed the keeping of the nodelist to a team of volunteers in St. Louis (Tony Clark, Ben Baker, Ken Kaplan, John Wichman, Mike Mellinger), who brought the error rate down to nearly zero within a few months; another source independently confirmed this two decades later. On December 4, 1984 the first issue of FidoNews came out, a mailing list in which Jennings, declaring himself editor, wrote: "I do NOT wish to be editor."

The ideology was deliberate rather than accidental: "Tom Jennings intended FidoNet to be a cooperative anarchy to provide minimal-cost public access to electronic mail"; in 1993 he himself said that "anarchism is a personal philosophy and not a political issue at all," and the design of the network was shaped directly by his broader punk and anarchist identity, which from 1988 also took the form of the zine Homocore, published together with Deke Nihilson. The attempt to formalize the network into an organization (IFNA) failed in the 1989 referendum, 480 votes in favor against 1,417 opposed: the network collectively rejected its own bureaucratization less than five years after launch.

Year-by-year timeline

Lesser-known but significant facts

  1. The former USSR outlived the network's world peak by five years and for a while made up more than half of the whole network. The world had been shrinking since 1996, while region 50 grew to 6,671 nodes in 2000 and from 2002 to 2009 held no less than half of all the nodes in the world.
  2. EchoMail, the network's main feature and its answer to forums, was thought up at a sysops' pizza party in Dallas, not in a lab. Chuck Lawson proposed the idea, Jeff Rush implemented it in a few weeks, and the formal FTSC standard was adopted only two years later.
  3. Most of the real users never made it into the nodelist at all. Points, a lightweight client layer on top of a node, connected only to their own host and carried none of a node's network obligations; the official node count systematically understates the number of living people in the network.
  4. The network held social order together without a single moderator, by escalating the "plus marks" beside an offender's name up to full read-only, and as far as a sanction on an entire node, sysop included.
  5. A Fido station, by the account of one of the organizers, helped pass news out of the White House in Moscow in August 1991, when other channels of communication were being cut off estimate.

Legend vs. the record

The first growth lever

The lever was operational rather than marketing: the network cut the barrier to entry to zero (free software, your own modem and phone line, and that was the whole of membership) and almost at once removed the one real bottleneck that could have stopped that free entry. Over the first few months the number of nodes grew from 2 to 50, and the list of node numbers began to break down: "every single week without fail there was at least one wrong number." Jennings did not try to scale that work himself: in August 1984, two months after the launch, he handed the keeping of the nodelist to a volunteer team in St. Louis, which brought the error rate down to nearly zero within a few months, and the network went on growing to 160+ nodes by the beginning of 1985 with no single point of failure in the person of its founder.

The second element was the economics of the connection itself. The network was arranged so that even intercity and international mail cost almost nothing: nodes inside a city called each other directly, while traffic between cities was gathered through "inbound hosts" so that nobody had to call each node separately; intercontinental mail went through "zonegates," and all of it most often at night, because "US telephone rates are much lower in the middle of the night." Growth needed neither capital nor a sales department, only a willing sysop and a phone line he already had.

Parallels today (projects from the catalog)

What a builder can take from this in 2026

  1. Cut the barrier to entry to zero, but close the first bottleneck that creates right away. Free entry produced explosive growth within months; had Jennings not delegated the nodelist in those first two months, growth would have choked on errors before the network became interesting to anyone.
  2. A single aggregated chart can hide two opposite markets. The claim that FidoNet has been dying since 1996 is true for the world and false for an entire region for another ten years; look only at the global curve and the best (or worst) market stays invisible.
  3. Building on someone else's already-paid-for infrastructure is a durable growth economy rather than a one-off hack. The telephone network's night rate made international communication almost free without a single wire of your own.
  4. Formal structures of control can be replaced by a transparent escalation of the rules, plus marks → read-only → a sanction on the whole node, instead of hiring moderators.
  5. A network outlives its inventor and its original economics as long as someone still needs the substrate. The 1,233 nodes in 2026 are not nostalgia; they are people who still need the FTN protocol for something.

Discrepancies and what we could not verify

Sources (primary first)

Secondary (context, cross-checking):

The same thing, about today

The same breakdowns, but of projects launching right now: what the product is, where the first users came from, how they charge. The card is free, the full dossier is $5 (the dossier itself is written in Russian).

Browse the dossier catalog →