Respected the process for getting on Fidonet. You had to figure it out, configure it properly and prove you were ready to go before you got a node number. No hand holding. Frontdoor and national mail hour.
Even if you were a "point" (an endpoint assigned to the node) you still had to set up the software and (in the mid-to-late 90s at least) set up a modem to call your node to upload/download. And sometimes you had to set up repeated dialing until you got through because the node could be busy (some nodes doubled as BBSs), or connection could be bad and it'd had to retry etc. Wasn't an easy task, so it served as a sort of a filter so that most people on there were geeks.
Later on of course some nodes started distributing over the Internet so setting up a node became much easier (and I think there was a way for the node to allow multiple users read/write without even setting up a node/point at all).
> The New York Times — which purchased Wordle back in 2022 — has filed several DMCA notices over Wordle clones created by GitHub coders, citing its ownership over the Wordle name and copyrighted gameplay including 5x6 tile layout and gray, yellow, and green color scheme.
This smells very similar to the issue with the tetris clone a number of years ago. The overall issue is that while games aren't copyrightable, the look and feel of a game can be copyrighted.
That ruling is really exasperating. The judge not accepting that the size of the tetris field is part of the rules of tetris is really weird to me. The tetronimoes don't even look similar in their comparison given the constraints of shapes made of four blocks, and, like, the texture obviously looks nothing like original tetris, it's just some basic-ass rendering of a shape with some color.
They had an interesting hack to connect to a high-res monitor. Timing wise they had to stick to the standard TV timing otherwise regular Amiga software would not work. So they created a hack where the Amiga would send 4 screens of pixels that would then assembled and sent to a high-res monitor. Screen refresh rate was very slow though.
I still have a (printed on dead trees!) manual for Coherent 3.2 (286 version, circa 1990-91) kicking around. Ran multiuser (login via tty or virtual terminals on the console) in 640Mb of RAM, off a 10Mb fully installed setup. If I remember correctly you were limited to 64Kb code & 64Kb data per process, though ... (Coherent 4.0 removed the addressing limit).
Wow. That could have been something! Might have been a commercial flop, but it would have exposed a lot of young folks to some useful ideas a decade or two before they otherwise would have been exposed.
If anyone posited alternate origins except what was the accepted leading thought of the time, they were ostracized across many segments of society. It became one of the things you couldn't discuss publicly.
Many topics became like this during covid including your mention of school closures. Weird time.
