Fidonet is an amateur electronic mail network with about 30,000 mail nodes world wide. Since most mail nodes are publicly accessible Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), some of which have hundreds of members, Fidonet probably ranks up there alongside some of the better known commercial on-line services in terms of the number of people who use it. Fidonet nodes are often personal computers in somebody's basement; the system operator (sysop) may be a young child or a retired gran ...