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rozzie 3 hours ago

FidoNet was a simply wonderful innovation, and it was a reflection of the creativity of its author - Tom Jennings - and his views of community and identity. https://grokipedia.com/page/tom_jennings

Tom was working on FidoNet in 1984, the same time my Iris co-founders and I had begun work on what became Lotus Notes. Architecturally, those of us who were working on collaborative systems in that era were shaped by the decentralized architecture of USEnet - inspired and motivated by the observation that a community could be brought together by something technologically as simple as uucp.

Both dial-up focused, Tom took this in the direction of a decentralized BBS, while I took it in the direction of masterless replicated nosql databases we called 'notefiles'. Identity being at the core, Tom was focused more on public community while we focused on private collaboration.

It was such an exciting time for emergent decentralization, shaped by a strong dose of 60's idealism.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21670035

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hackers_Conference

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Compute...

https://www.stevenlevy.com/crypto

andsoitis 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> Tom Jennings - and his views of community and identity. https://grokipedia.com/page/tom_jennings

Human version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Jennings

thatxliner 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Is this not a bot?

andsoitis 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Possible.

Their HN profile claims they’re Ray Ozzie, which I find hard to believe.

https://keybase.io/rozzie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Ozzie

tclancy 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Their account that has been posting for over 15 years and has made numerous comments with real insight into the times under discussion? I know it's necessary to have a healthy bit of skepticism when being on the Internet but I think we could agree this is one of the weirdest, longest, dumbest cons in the history of confidence games if this is not Ray Ozzie.

HN has a fairly wide group of "famous" contributors like Woz, etc.

andsoitis 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Right, which is why my first instinct was to write “possible”.

If it is you, Ray: I thought your creations Lotus Notes and Groove were phenomenal!!

Cyphase 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure looks legit based on the linked Keybase, Twitter, and GitHub.