From lisa@psg.com Fri May 26 06:57:37 1995 Message-Id: From: lisa@psg.com (Lisa Gronke) Subject: An Alien Looks at FidoNet - Mailer Types To: randy@psg.com (Randy Bush) Date: Fri, 26 May 1995 06:57:36 -0700 (PDT) FidoNews 12-20 Page: 7 15 May 1995 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- An Alien Looks at FidoNet by Lisa Gronke, 1:105/6 lisa@psg.com I am female! I am a dialup BBS user! I am an alien who uses a 10 year old Apple //e with an equally ancient comm program, Apple DOS 3.3 and 141K floppy disks! No IBM graphics. No VT100 emulation. No ZIP, ARJ or RAR. XModem file transfer only. I first came online in the fall of 1985. Early in 1986 I became the sysop of an Apple BBS operating at a remote location. Shortly thereafter, I inherited the (Portland OR) Bit Bucket BBS List, when Rick Bensene, who started the list in 1982, retired from the BBS world to bring up a private unix system. Cruising local BBS in November, 1986, I found a new BBS named PSG Portland (sysop Randy Bush). Randy had just moved up to Portland from Coos Bay and was still acting as NC of the Coos Bay NET, 122/0. He became NC of Net 105 the following April. I asked a lot of questions. I got good answers. I learned a lot about FidoNet. Since 1989, I've occupied the Ruby Tuesday alias on one or another of Randy's systems, although I first heard the Rolling Stones song at Reg17Con last summer, when Bob Satti dug out an old album and played it for me. Occupying the alias happened as sort of a joke, but it gets me into sysop conferences without going thru a lot of hassle. Newer sysops may not realize it, but the structure of FidoNet is based on hostrouted netmail. I currently hang out at 1:105/6, which hosts the zonegates, 1:1/2, 1:1/3 etc. Randy routinely hostroutes incoming netmail from Zones [2-6] to Zone 1 destinations. He's one of the last big time hostrouters. Delivering 50+ bundles a night, in the course of a week or so, 1:105/6 calls about half of the Zone 1 Net Hosts. There are a couple of NETS with special routing where the dawg never calls the NC, and in any given week, a few which are not answering or are undialable. Since 1:105/6 only calls if there is incoming international mail, it is not a random sample, but it's the best I've got. So here is my informal survey of the mailers Zone 1 NCs are running. Based on nodelist.125 [05-May-95], data from.... Region 10 14 Net Hosts of 28 NETS 50.0% Region 11 28 Net Hosts of 59 NETS 47.5% Region 12 20 Net Hosts of 27 NETS 74.1% Region 13 24 Net Hosts of 48 NETS 50.0% Region 14 11 Net Hosts of 30 NETS 36.7% Region 15 8 Net Hosts of 27 NETS 29.6% Region 16 10 Net Hosts of 17 NETS 58.8% Region 17 23 Net Hosts of 44 NETS 52.3% Region 18 45 Net Hosts of 99 NETS 45.5% Region 19 22 Net Hosts of 53 NETS 41.5% ------------------------ Total 205 Net Hosts of 432 NETS 47.5% Mailer Number of NCs ----------------------- ------------- FrontDoor 2.30 5 FrontDoor 2.20 20 FrontDoor 2.12 34 FrontDoor 2.02 10 Total FrontDoor 69 Binkley 2.59 60 Other Bink (2.50, 2.56) 6 Total Binkley 66 InterMail 2.29 26 InterMail 2.20 1 Total InterMail 27 D'Bridge 1.58 13 Other D'Bridge (1.30, 1.54) 2 Total D'Bridge 15 TIMS 1.10 8 Portal of Power 0.63 2 Portal of Power 0.62 4 Total Portal of Power 6 Lora-CBIS 2.40 3 Opus (1.10, 1.73) 2 MainDoor (1.00, 1.01) 2 SEAdog 4.51 1 Unknown 0.01 2 Unknown 15.21 1 Trap Door (Amiga) 1.85 2 StarNet (Amiga) 1.168 1 Brought to you by pencil.com, a liveware package from Serengeti Software run by a 1.4 kg water based cpu with programable RAM. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- .