The day had to come, I knew it, I just postponed it for as long as possible. But now it is time to move on, it is time to close down my Fidonet system for good, over twenty years after setting up my first system. My Fidonet history has been going through a lot of different setups, starting out with reading off BBSes using Blue Wave, through a simple point setup with Terminate on MS-DOS, moving on to an OS/2-based system using SquishMail using timEd and Fleet Street as readers, even serving as the Swedish shareware registration agent for Fleet Street for a few years at the Fidonet peak in the late 1990s.

I then moved to a Linux-based system using CrashMail II (for a while, running timEd through an MS-DOS emulator under Linux, before GoldEd was ported to Linux), and lately using a Usenet News reader and the JAMNNTPd software. During my tenure as a Debian developer, I had a lot of this stuff packaged for Debian, but I haven’t checked if they are still there. I have just been using the stuff I compiled several years ago, but lately it has simply stopped working. Maybe my message bases have broken completely, I don’t know, and considering how seldom I read them, I figured now was the time to shut the system down for good.

It is still a bit sad, I remember the peak around 1996–1998, when I moderated a chat area and had enforce a limit of 50 posts per day per author, else it would overflow completely (remember, this was at the time where it could take a day or three for the messages to propagate). Now I don’t know how many years it has been since anyone even posted a single message in any of the derelict Swedish areas. There is some activity in the international areas,

Good-bye, Fidonet!