Meet FIDOSlax Linux - an operating system with integrated hypertext Fidonet support

This long story began shortly before the end of the last millennium.

Old-time networkers will surely remember how Microsoft included Internet Explorer 3 in Windows 95 OSR2, and Internet Explorer 4 in Windows 98. This event is considered the beginning of a browser war that led to a dramatic development of HTML, CSS, DOM and javascripts, however, caused site builders to sweat a lot on overcoming the incompatibilities of different browsers. However, perhaps, an even greater effect and practical benefit of this event is that every buyer of a popular operating system had ready software for immediate access to the Internet (and, above all, to the World Wide Web) in the future.

Thereby a crushing blow was also struck at Fidonet’s popularity. Pay attention to the following graph of the number of nodes of the second (European) zone Fidonet (taken from the German site Fido-Statistik ) - you can easily see there, as the explosive exponential growth of the Fidonet Network changed in those years to fall:

To a certain extent, Fidonet himself was guilty of his fall. The idea of ​​a single form of addressing resources (the idea of ​​URLs) and the ease of following hyperlinks are the features of the World Wide Web that predetermined its popularity. Fidonet should have taken them even then. Unfortunately, the freedom and openness of the source code in those years was not yet as popular as it is now, so all enthusiasts beat their heads against the wall of having to compose a bunch of code from scratch - and gradually subsided.
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But better late than never. Times have changed. Now it's January 2011. About a year ago we discussed (right here, on this blog) the emergence of support for hypertext Fidonet in the cross-platform fidoip software package. Unlike fifteen-year-old browsers, everything is different here: we are talking about an open source bundled software (binkd, Husky, GoldED-NSF ). So it was just a matter of time that the emergence of such a free operating system that “out of the box” would contain ready, built-in support for hypertext Fidonet.

And here it is: FIDOSlax Linux . Hosting on Google Code, two news on Linux.org.Ru: the release of version 1.0 and the release of version 1.1 .

Being the author of the modern idea of ​​hypertext Fidonet, I look at FIDOSlax with the same genuine joy, with what Tim Berners-Lee (the author of the WWW idea) must have looked at ninety-eighth Windows. It is always nice to see how other people implement and promote your ideas.