The great FidoNet Robotech controversy

The roughly mid-90's and earlier (generally pre-Toonami, pre-anime boom) era of anime & manga fandom: early cons, clubs, tape trading, Nth Generation VHS fansubs, old magazines & fanzines, fandubs, ancient merchandise, rec.arts.anime, and more!
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Re: The great FidoNet Robotech controversy

Post by _D_ »

Oddly enough, I saw a commercial for the current iteration of AOL, a company I had assumed long since vanished...
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Re: The great FidoNet Robotech controversy

Post by greg »

I see where you're coming from, Dave. I admit that I do not have a ton of fond memories of the FIDOnet Anime Echo. Most of my nostalgia comes from AnimeNet, which was a FIDO derivative of sorts. It was a bunch of sub echoes, with a section for discussions on Bubblegum Crisis, Ranma 1/2, KOR, various genres, etc. I made a lot of good acquaintences on there and it was moderated very well. Once AnimeNet came along, I rarely ever looked back on the FIDO Anime Echo.
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Re: The great FidoNet Robotech controversy

Post by davemerrill »

I do remember AnimeNet, it seemed to be a little more civil, a tad more productive for some reason. Having the dedicated sub-groups seemed to parcel the activity out in a more structured fashion.
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Re: The great FidoNet Robotech controversy

Post by greg »

Indeed! That is why I never warmed up to rec.arts.anime much once I had Usenet access in college. I missed the structured topics of AnimeNet. I mostly was on rec.arts.anime.games at the time. I think there was an alt.bubblegumcrisis or something like that, too, wasn't there?

When I sold my house two years ago, I had a real relic from the golden days of the Internet: an actual book that attempted to be an "Internet Yellow Pages." It was broken down by categories and listed the URLs of Websites, the addresses on Usenet, and even FTP sites. I wanted to hold onto it for nostalgic purposes, but I had to make a tough call and the used book store wouldn't take it. I tossed it in my recycle dumpster.
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Re: The great FidoNet Robotech controversy

Post by davemerrill »

I wasn't in charge of the internet-based promotion, but rec.arts.anime was a great way to get the word out about the early AWAs. Merely reading rec.arts.anime automatically meant you were our target demographic, and we could reach you by sending one email. Beats the hell out of bulk mailing, lemme tell ya. Later there were things like rec.arts. anime.conventions, etc., but even at its height you could put the word out on them all really easily. I don't know if I ever attempted to stay current on the newsgroups, though; way too much to keep track of.
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Re: The great FidoNet Robotech controversy

Post by greg »

Plus, there was just WAY TOO MUCH SPAM on Usenet! That was one of the reasons why I started ignoring it. Towards the end, it was nothing but spam.
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Re: The great FidoNet Robotech controversy

Post by kndy »

davemerrill wrote:In my experience, we were going to anime conventions and publishing fanzines and fan-subtitling and shooting parody videos and running local anime clubs and programming anime rooms at SF/comic cons, swapping tapes with people across the country and around the world, drawing fan art, writing fan fiction, doing all that anime fan stuff. Fidonet helped with none of it. It was all the arguing, pedantry, nit-pickery nonsense of your typical fandom APA, with none of the actual meaningful conversations or connections that made APAs worthwhile.

There was plenty of arguing on the GENIE network, but that also was used to promote fan activity (until they raised their prices and everybody quit). USEnet was a valuable tool. Our local Atlanta anime BBS was a good way to get information out to a small subset of the fandom, though obviously its use was very limited. One user at at a time, that's pretty limited.

Once it got to be 1996 and the internet started to become what we know it as today, things like Fidonet got kicked to the curb without even a second glance. Dropped like a bad transmission, as they say. I don't miss it one teensy bit.
I actually also don't miss FIDOnet or even rec.arts.anime all that much because of the constant arguing and debating. It was so fascinating to see people debate of the mechanical designs of a mecha suit and what would work in real life. Just a side note, that Drew Webber who posted that on FIDOnet was a Sysop for a New York Anime BBS, while I headed Neo Tokyo in California....both of us had single node BBS...lol...So, we had to give people capped times. But it proved unsuccessful as people were using 2400 baud modems and to download a file that was under a MB took forever back then. Geez, I can remember a 4MB file taking 8 hours back then.
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Re: The great FidoNet Robotech controversy

Post by Heero »

kndy wrote:Geez, I can remember a 4MB file taking 8 hours back then.
Geez, what would you DO with all that data? Floppies only held 1.44MB. ;)
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Re: The great FidoNet Robotech controversy

Post by usamimi »

Yikes. I think I must be one of the only people out there with fond memories of some Streamline releases (well, mostly Robot Carnival and Akira--I can't listen to the newer dub of Akira, to me it's just not the same without Cam Clarke screaming at the top of his lungs XD). While I was always a bit miffed when Streamline (or any company, really) refused to release something in it's original Japanese I could at least understand WHY they did it... Obviously, they're trying to reach more consumers, and sadly, most mainstream consumers are more likely to watch something in English rather than Japanese. Even today, that still seems to be the norm (hence Netflix's insistence on streaming 99% of their anime in English with no option to view otherwise.)

Of course, to be fair, I probably sounded a lot like that back in the 90s, too. ^^; I definitely went through a phase of "subbed, original anime is always superior"....while I still seem to watch most anime in Japanese first, now I'm a lot less picky when it comes to it (unless the dub is just outright bad, which of course still happens sometimes.)

I think companies like AnimEigo spoiled me...I get annoyed now when the people subtitling something don't include subtitles for signs, letters, or other things with writing in the background. Sometimes I'll be able to pick out what things say if it's in kata/hiragana, but I doubt most casual watchers can. (I also miss their liner notes, they always had such good ones!)

I never really used any of those anime fan/discussion sites, mostly because I was always weary of strangers on the internet back in the day--it wasn't until the mid/early 90s that I joined a couple of email groups that I really started talking with people online. But I noticed that they, too, were filled with a lot of needless and petty fighting. It was annoying, but I did meet a few nice people along the way.
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Re: The great FidoNet Robotech controversy

Post by kndy »

Heero wrote:
kndy wrote:Geez, I can remember a 4MB file taking 8 hours back then.
Geez, what would you DO with all that data? Floppies only held 1.44MB. ;)
The 4MB file that people were downloading a lot back then was Mortal Kombat - The Demo version with two playable characters..lol. Back then, that game and an anime version of Wolfenstein were the big rage in the early '90s. Especially small videos...

For that data, we had a software that split off files. Forgot it was called...Not Stacker or dblspace but something that split zip files up.
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