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A short history lesson will help in understanding FidoNet. Tom Jennings was in San Francisco, and John Madill was in Baltimore, both working on the Fido BBS software. In the spirit of finding out if it could be done, they decided to add code to the system to support a dialup connection with no human interven- tion during the wee hours when the sysops were sleeping and the systems were free. This quickly became a useful function, since both systems and both sysops were busy and it was a convenient method of exchanging information.
From this chance beginning in May 1984, growth was phenomenal. By August 1984, there were 30 nodes; by September there were 50. By February 1985, there were 160 systems, and a group of sysops in St. Louis had taken over the administration of the list of systems. In June 1985 the network converted to the two-part addressing scheme to support the growth. By 1987 there were over 2000 nodes, and change continued with a zone-based nodelist to facilitate communication with systems overseas. Now in 1995, the size of the network has reached 35000 nodes.
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