Remember Fidonet? - Old clunker laptops & cellphones independent of the Internet. (Just dreaming)

[Omega-TI]

What could be more RETRO than Fidonet?

Imagine for a minute going to bed at night and plugging your cellphone into an old outdated clunker of a laptop PC (to charge)... with a USB port of course and having a program on it calling out for echo mail like the old SCANNER RADIO ECHO or SCAN17? Dial up modems and landlines are a thing of the past for most people, but we all have cellphones and most of us have old outdated PC's. Imagine having a PC with just enough OS to interface to your Android cellphone and run a Fidonet-like node or point system. If anything ever happened to the Internet for whatever reason, messages could still flow between users of the same interests.

Sure, the Internet is great and all, but having a secondary network already up and running would be fun to use, give our old hardware a new lease on life and could be a great parallel for partial backup messaging if anything ever happened.

Now I don't have the technical skill to write or implement do anything like this, I'm just a dreamer, but if it ever came to pass, I'd be on it like flies on you know what.

 

[BinaryMode]

If the Internet goes out your cellphone data does as well. Unless you're talking about dial-up over the cellphone. In which case that may not work due to the audio frequency limitations of the phone.

Better off with a mesh system like Meshtastic or something.

In this time frame with a very active Sun, it be wise to store such stuff in airtight containers and bury at least 3' down...