FidoNet, created in 1984, let independent bulletin board systems around the world exchange messages with each other overnight — a homemade internet before most people had the real thing.

Programmer Tom Jennings built it just to move messages between his own BBS and a friend's; within two months it had grown to 30 connected boards, and by the early 1990s more than 32,000. Because long-distance calls were expensive, FidoNet software batched messages and sent them in the middle of the night when phone rates were cheapest. For years it was many BBS users' only way to reach people outside their local calling area.