robert adrian on Wed, 11 Jun 2014 17:21:46 +0200 (CEST)


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Re: <nettime> To-morrow the Minitel! (!)


Hello Tjebbe

Am 10.06.2014 um 13:24 schrieb Tjebbe van Tijen:

you focus on art-projects using telecom... which was not my intend.

In your original Nettime mail you wrote :

In the years 1988/1989 we were organising in Amsterdam a
congregation from radical publishers, performers and groups from all
over Europe from Russia to the British isles, from Norway to Spain:
Europe Against The Current.

This sounded to me like a description of art or art-related projects. No?
-----------

Also we have forgotten here to mention the FIDO (dial-up network) which was fully alive and had some kind of a global span at that time. The bottom up node system may be an inspiration for independent data-communication in our times, by combining it with short wave radio.

FIDO is a protocol for networking Bulletin Board Systems. Tom Jennings claimed that in the 90s there were something like 35000 BBS servers worldwide using the FIDO protocol. Unfortunately the network depended on normal telephone connection (meaning normal long distance charges) so that the system was never really global ... intercontinental traffic was simply too costly. The Internet changed all that and in the early 90s many BBSs were struggling to build "gateways" to the Internet (mostly via university servers) when it became clear that the "Network of Networks" was the answer to the problem - global connection for the price of a local phonecall. Some succeeded but most failed ... but that's another story.

In late 1994 the Internet/WWW became available for everybody with a computer, modem and telephone. Pre-history was over!

best

robert
======================
robert adrian
<http://alien.mur.at/rax/>


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