It does me no credit but I feel I must admit throughout the eighties and nineties many of my fellow sysadmins and I were not kind about Fido and like BBS, from our extremely privileged and funded dialup inter-uni UUCP and subsequently TCP/IP world view, it was already dead. These kinds of cultural snobbery do us no credit, and it's clear that nicer and wiser heads than mine ran cross connects and it became what John Quartermain called "the matrix" long before the movie.

I was an upstream of one or two BBS for a few years, gatewaying Usenet news and email. We treated them exactly like the UUCP and ACSnet feeds, and the military over x.25 and OSI x.400 mail, but we didn't always feel very charitable towards them.

I now respect this kind of self organised bootstrapping behaviour much more.