Dallas Hinton:
The work done by Tom Jennings in 1983-84 resulted in a
bulletin board system (BBS) called "Fido because the
assorted hardware together was a real mongrel". The
software linkage between 2 systems became a network and
spawned the name FidoNet.
Indeed, FidoNet started as a network of BBSes, with the
necessary extensions for semi-automated article propagation.
The use of 2 capital letters is correct and is a (now
expired) trademark. The program has also been called
FIDONET (by Ben Baker) but that wasn't what was
trademarked by Tom.
This may have been due to a convention or limitation of a
case-insensitive file system, cf. lowercase program names in
Linux in spite of its case-sensitive file system.
Source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet and personal knowledge from communications with Tom and others involved in the creation of FidoNet.
Since you wrote it in a single long line, I for a moment
thought that was such a great page on Wikipedia documenting
personal knowledge of FidoNet (-: But of course personal
communication with a carrier of such personal knowledge is
even more interesting and pleasing. Is there a way to ask
an autograph over FidoNet? Should be an auto-ASCII-graph,
probably.
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* Origin: nntp://news.fidonet.fi (2:221/6.0)