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| | ASCII by Jason Scott: Tom Jennings, Renaissance Man (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06) |
 | | Sure, you say, Arpanet and all that, but unlike Arpanet, Jennings' program just required a modem and a PC and a phone line, and suddenly you had a personal node on the network, right there. |
 | | This was the "ah hah" that brought many more people in to keep this dream going, folks who didn't have the opportunity of working on DARPA research projects or cradled in the hands of an academic institution. |
 | | A large group of folks circled around Tom when he started working on Fido, taking the fidonet network and making it more scalable and robust, improving the "fidonet protocol" and, even cooler, writing third-party modules that would allow you to bootstrap a ton of other BBS programs into the Fidonet network as well. |
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