About this archive

In short: this site gathers, orders, and makes searchable the whole of FidoNews —FidoNet's weekly newsletter since 1984— so that forty years of the network's voice are a click away. Whether you are a sysop after an exact reference or you have just arrived out of curiosity, the door is the same.

If you have landed here without knowing what FidoNews is, one sentence is worth it: it is FidoNet's weekly newsletter, published since December 1984 and still alive. Tom Jennings, who started it, described it as the "meta-network" —the means FidoNet has to talk about itself— and said it was the only thing that consistently united all the network's sysops. Its beauty was always the same: any member could submit an article, and what they wrote reached everyone else. An open forum, weekly, in plain text, decades before those words meant what they mean today.

What this site does is simple and necessary: to gather that corpus, which survives scattered across mirrors everywhere, and make it consultable again. For those who come from the world of FidoNet, that means full-text search across every issue, each one's original .nws downloadable, and a stable address for every edition, so you can link to it with confidence. For those arriving new, it is a window onto forty years of a worldwide community of volunteers thinking out loud: announcements, technical debates, network policy, arguments, and jokes. It is not a manual or an encyclopedia; it is the conversation, just as it happened.

It is worth saying why a site like this exists. This memory is fragile. Much of the early material was lost in a disk failure, and several archive projects have gone offline over time; what remains survives thanks to the volunteer effort of a few people. Bringing these issues together in one place, well ordered and searchable, is a way to make that preservation a little less precarious. We do not claim the archive is complete or definitive: it is the best collection we could put together from the available sources, and it will grow as we find more.

So if you are one of those who was there and you notice a missing issue, a link that does not work, or a date that does not add up, telling us is the best way to help: every correction makes the archive a little more faithful. And a note on use: FidoNews articles were written by specific people, so linking to them is always safe, but reproducing or reusing them beyond consultation calls for the permission of their authors or the editor. This site has no advertising and no profit motive; it is, as FidoNews itself always was, work done for the love of preserving it.

→ Start with the search: type a name, a node address, a topic, or a word, and watch the network's voice appear. → Search the archive