Tom Jennings 9 Dec 85 125/1 Some interesting things happened to me in the last few weeks; the Hobbycomputerclub (HCC) of Holland invited me over there to officially open their club-run FidoNet in Holland, consisting of some 15 or 16 Fidos. I spent a total of 12 days out of the country, visiting England as well. There is so much to tell that I don't know where to start. I'll first just cover the trip serially, but there is also important information about Fido, and BBS's in general, in Europe that will have to be covered seperately. I may have to leave out important details at first, and get to the later. Please bear with me. At first I was a bit suprised that a computer club could and would afford to fly someone from the U. S. just to attend a club show and open a FidoNet network. The real suprise was discovering that the HCC has over 25,000 members, and that their "newsletter" resembles a slightly thin issue of Byte magazine! Clubs on this scale just don't exist here in the U. S. as far as I know. I was greeted at Schipol airport, outside Amsterdam, by Henk Wevers, whose house I would be staying at. Henk, as it turns out, is a major force behind the Dutch FidoNet, and Fido in Europe in general, as well as one of the key people in the HCC. Henk also runs a Fido in Ede, which appears in the nodelist. After recovering from serious jet lag (9 hour clock difference plus a 9 hour flight) we headed to the show in Utrecht Friday morning. Utrecht is a major city in Holland, and a major business center. The show filled a large hall, similar to most US convention centers (SF's Civic Center for instance) and had about 30,000 attendees on Friday. The Fido booths were right at the main entrance; there was a large entranceway announcing the HCC show, and Fido was right where you went in. Fido had a very large presence, and there were a couple of Fidos running demos during the entire two day show. BBS's are just starting to generate large interest amongst hobbiests, because of the modem problem; while we in North America have only three universal protocols (Bell 103A, Bell 212A, and CCITT V.22bis for 2400 baud), in Europe there are at least a half dozen incompatible protocols, and the North American models are all useless. This subject will be covered in detail later. There was a tremendous amount of interest in Fido, if you had told me beforehand I would not have believed you. At a talk given by Henk explaining the HCC's plans for Fidos in Holland, and where I answered questions, the room was filled to capacity, standing room only. Needless to say, I was not prepared for such a response, I'm not used to this! There was coverage on national TV, newspapers and radio about the show (the HCC is taken very seriously) including Fido. The next day, Saturday, was similar, but much busier. Hectic is not the right word, we literally ran from one event to the next for much of the day. The show was packed with visitors. I guess all computer shows are basically the same, no matter where they are held. There was row after row of booths, all displaying various products, many small machines making noise and playing games, others showing more sedate things like monitors for IBM clones, and so on. There was also a very large user group presence; anyone familiar with the unfortunate recent history of the West Coast Computer Faire will appreciate this! The fact that most communication is done in Dutch is the first indication that something is different, and after looking closely you see that emphasis is put on different kinds of products and services. The most common machine by far is the Commodore 64. While it's a popular machine here, it's nothing compared to Holland at least. I saw more add on hardware and software that I decided to think about purchasing one for myself. CP/M is very popular, mostly a thing called the Amstrad (spelling?) which from what I've seen is very nice, color graphics and so on, and seems to be high quality. On Saturday morning, Pieter van Diepen, the current publisher of the HCC magazine, gave me a quick tour of old Utrecht. (The part we were in was a typical high tech city, with the usual traffic and hotels.) The old city surrounds canals, ancient churches (I mean ancient, hard for us Yankees to appreciate 600 year old anything), and a coffehouse that has been in continuous operation for about 300 years, where we had coffee, and made us late enough to mess up the plans for opening FidoNet on live radio. Sigh. I don't remember seeing a single IBM computer; like here, most these days are Taiwan clones. The Taiwanese are changing the world of computing in ways they may not realize; someone like IBM does the large scale design, the cloners simplify and improve the design (Faraday, etc) and the Taiwanese manufacture them in *huge* quantities, for cheap, and all that I've seen are of pretty good quality. Even I have one. These are what most European Fidos are running on, and I would guess the same is true for North America. The international sysops meeting was held Saturday afternoon. Henk Wevers and other Holland sysops where there, plus Frank and Silvia Thornley from England, Martin ? from England, Bob ? (sorry for the ?) from Dataflex (a modem manufacturer) in London, Arne Asplem and Robert Hercz from Norway, and of course me. Helge ? from Sweden had an accident and could not make it. It was not a big complex affair, mostly just a get together, but past experience says that more was accomplished than meets the eye. Merely putting names with faces does a lot of good. We cleared up some misunderstandings about putting the European nodes in the Boston net; for example, what we thought was a convenience turns out to really make for additional work. Since Fido doesnt know about "countries" (yet) they were included in the Boston net so that the mail would get routed properly; in reality, it makes it extremely difficult to handle mail in Europe, as most mail is done via PICKUP and POLL due to the lack of autodial modems. That night, there was a big banquet for the HCC staff that put it all together, we ate too much good food and drank real beer, not this "lite" stuff. Pour that stuff down the drain! The next day, Sunday, Frank, Silvia, Arne, Robert, Bob, Martin and I went in two cars to Belgium to take the ferry to Dover, and then on to Frank's house in Woking. The drive itself was interesting; by the time we made it on to the ferry, I had three flavors of money (dollars, guilders, pounds), which makes small purchases very interesting until you get used to it. Robert and Arne also had German marks, and presumably Norwegian money. Welcome to Europe. From the ferry we all went directly to Frank's house, where we all spent the night. The truly hardcore gang (Martin, Bob, Arne and Robert) stayed up all night setting up Robert's computer, and playing with Frank's huge collection of IBM PC software. Us more rational types went to bed. For the next few days, we talked about various things, Fido of course among them, and Frank gave us the grand tour of London and area. It was an excellent tour; it would have taken me weeks and weeks of vacationing to hit all the spots, if I could have ever found them at all. One I would not have found was the pub at Fullers brewery. The best bitter beer I ever had, period. Drank a fair amount there, took some back with us ... us hardcore types drank it and other things, the more rational ones went to sleep. Guess who had a hangover. And yes, it was worth it. For the next three days, four of us traveled around London and area, Martin and Bob having gone home. We visited Dataflex (makers of addon boards for various computers, and soon a Hayes compatible modem). On Wednesday, I returned to Holland, and spent three days pointlessly wandering around Amsterdam, having a wonderful time taking pictures and freezing to death. A hint for travelers: the standard travel books (Fodors, Baedakers, etc) absolutely refuse to mention the weather, with one exception that crammed "average yearly temperatures" over much of Europe into one paragraph. Europe is miserably cold in the winter. Plan on New York City weather. Cold, wet, more cold and wet. It was supposedly colder than usual for that time of year. this always happens to me; I was in the South West high desert, and it rained. I went to Phoenix AZ four years ago, and it rained there, too. Maybe it's me. On Sunday, I returned to San Francisco, on an eleven hour flight; jet lag in this direction isn't too bad, relatively speaking. I want to thank once again everyone who made my trip over pleasant, never mind possible. Henk Wevers and his family for making me welcome at their home and to Henk for arranging things; Frank Thornley for putting me up at his home, and or putting up with all the hackers messing up his house, and for the grand tour of London. It was appreciated! And of course to the people fo the HCC for their enthusiasm for Fido and friendliness. The modem situation in Europe is very very different than here in N. A. In the U. S., we have the "benefit" of having our modem protocols dictated to us by the one time telecom monopoly, AT&T. We have the Bell 103A protocol for 300 baud and less and Bell 212A for 1200 baud. There are and were others, of course, but most have thankfully died out; Bell 202A is still used by radio amateurs, however, mainly for radio use. This is not a discussion of technical excellence in protocol design; merely observations on practical reality. I don't care for the way Bell did their 1200 baud protocol either. Anyways ... In Europe, however, things are a little different. There are at least a half dozen different protocols, most defined by the CCITT. (Don't ask ...) The main ones, I think, are 300 baud V.21, 1200 baud V.22, 1200/75 Viditel, and V.22bis 2400 baud. Modems are very expensive, and there doesn't seem to by the hobbiest/microcomputer type array of modems we have here. While compared to the North American continent Europe is physically compact, (it takes 5 hours to fly from San Francisco to New York, and somewhat less than that from there to Amsterdam) there are many languages in use, most incomprehensible to each other. Lucky for us, English is the technical language of choice, so Europeans are not as intimidated by English as we are (generally) by Dutch, French, German, etc. I am familiar somewhat with AT&T's policies as to making connections to the phone line; I do not know what the situation is in countries in Europe, whether it's easy or hard, or if it varies from country or not. The PTT seems to be everywhere; is it the same across Europe or different all over? Last, but definitely not least ... The person who basically started Fido in Europe was Ron Smallwood, in London. He was Fido #33, and first started in early 1984. Talk about pioneering ... not too much was heard from him over here, due mainly to the incompatibilities, the time differences and the expense of overseas phone calls. Ron is not running Fidos anymore, but he kept things going long enough for others to pick it up. I did not get to meet Ron, I ran out of time and had to leave, but I'm sure we will meet in the future. I'm sure I missed or glossed over many important points, if there are any questions or corrections please feel free, etc. And thanks once again for everyone involved for the very pleasant and informative trip to Europe! Ref: FidoNews 2-44 (16-Dec-1985) http://195.226.109.55/jhassler/wif/doks/fnews/fido244.txt By: Tom Jennings