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86-421: The term and similar concepts enjoy widespread popularity as a stock character and a villainous moniker in fantasy and related genres as well as in literary analysis of such works. As the name implies, a dark lord is characterized as a given setting's embodiment of evil, darkness , or death (either metatextually or as literal figure within a work's mythopoeia ) in a position of immense power, most often as

172-450: A devil or antichrist figure. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy notes that common features of a dark lord character include being "already defeated but not destroyed aeons before" and engaging in "wounding of the land" or other rituals of desecration . Japanese media often features an equivalent of this archetype called a "demon king" ( 魔王 , maō ) , drawing from analogous figures in religion and folklore. Philip Pullman noted that

258-456: A storytelling tradition or convention . There is a wide range of stock characters , covering people of various ages, social classes and demeanors. They are archetypal characters distinguished by their simplification and flatness . As a result, they tend to be easy targets for parody and to be criticized as clichés . The presence of a particular array of stock characters is a key component of many genres , and they often help to identify

344-517: A tosser put them back into the new system's forums. Echomail was so popular that for many users, Echomail was the FidoNet. Private person-to-person Netmail was relatively rare. FidoNet is politically organized into a tree structure, with different parts of the tree electing their respective coordinators. The FidoNet hierarchy consists of zones , regions , networks , nodes and points broken down more-or-less geographically. The highest level

430-549: A "self-derogatory and understating character". In American popular films, there are a wide range of stock characters, which are typically used as non-speaking extras in the background, bit parts with a single line, minor secondary/supporting roles, or major secondary/supporting roles. Stock characters in American films have changed over the decades. A 1930s or 1940s film's stock characters include newspaper vendors, ice vendors, street sweepers, and cigarette girls; in contrast,

516-399: A 1990s film has homeless " bag ladies ", pimps, plainclothes police, business women, and Black and Hispanic stereotypes. Stock characters in American popular culture, especially racial and ethnic stereotypes, often came to be seen as offensive in later decades and were replaced with new stereotypes. For example, the " lazy Black " and the " treacherous bespectacled Japanese " were replaced in

602-409: A competent evil overlord to avoid the well-known, cliché blunders committed by dark lords, supervillains , and other archetypal antagonists in popular fiction. For example, one such resolution is: "I will not gloat over my enemies' predicament to show my superiority. I will shoot them." Internet copies of these lists vary in number and order of entries. The most famous lists, both referred to as

688-582: A creative writing professor and prolific fiction author, all characters begin as stock characters and are fleshed out only as far as needed to advance the plot. E. Graham McKinley says "there is general agreement on the importance to drama of 'stock' characters. This notion has been considerably explored in film theory, where feminists have argued, female stock characters are only stereotypes (child/woman, whore, bitch, wife, mother, secretary or girl Friday , career women, vamp , etc.)." Ulrike Roesler and Jayandra Soni analyze "not only with female stock characters in

774-779: A dark lord, including the Celtic Balor , the Christian Lucifer , (known in Latin as the Princeps Tenebrarum , the Prince of Darkness in Milton's Paradise Lost ) and various other chthonic figures or evil kings and sorcerers . The concept was developed throughout the nineteenth century with characters such as Richard Wagner 's Alberich or Bram Stoker 's Count Dracula , before crystalizing in 1954 with

860-406: A genre or subgenre. For example, a story with the stock characters of a knight-errant and a witch is probably a fairy tale or fantasy . There are several purposes to using stock characters. Stock characters are a time- and effort-saving shortcut for story creators, as authors can populate their tale with existing well-known character types. Another benefit is that stock characters help to move

946-588: A host BBS system. Point mail was delivered to a selected host as if it was addressed to a user on that machine, but then re-packaged into a packet for the point to pick up on-demand. The complete addressing format was now zone:net/node.point , so a real example might be Bob Smith@1:250/250.10 . Points were widely used only for a short time, the introduction of offline reader systems filled this role with systems that were much easier to use. Points remain in use to this day but are less popular than when they were introduced. FidoNet supported file attachments from even

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1032-409: A leader or emperor with a variety of minions and/or lesser villains at their disposal to influence their conflict against a heroic protagonist in a primarily indirect way, though they may additionally be depicted as wielding great physical or magical capabilities should a hero ever confront them personally. There is a wealth of literary , folkloric , and theological precedent for the idea of

1118-502: A long-distance problem that no longer existed. The FidoNet nodelist started shrinking, especially in areas with a widespread availability of internet connections. This downward trend continues but has levelled out at approximately 2,500 nodes. FidoNet remains popular in areas where Internet access is difficult to come by, or expensive. Around 2014, a retro movement led to a slow increase in internet-connected BBS and nodes. Telnet, rlogin, and SSH are being used between systems. This means

1204-432: A netmail message to a special system, Node 51. The message contained various required contact information. If this message was transmitted successfully, it ensured that at least some of the system was working properly. The nodelist team would then reply with another netmail message back to the system in question, containing the assigned node number. If delivery succeeded, the system was considered to be working properly, and it

1290-628: A new bulletin board system that would emerge as Fido BBS. It was called "Fido" because the assorted hardware together was "a real mongrel". Jennings set up the system in San Francisco sometime in early 1984. Another early user was John Madill, who was trying to set up a similar system in Baltimore on his Rainbow 100 . Fido started spreading to new systems, and Jennings eventually started keeping an informal list of their phone numbers, with Jennings becoming #1 and Madill #2. Jennings released

1376-735: A store and forward public message system similar to Usenet , but based on, and hosted by, the FidoNet system. The first such echomail forum was one created by the Dallas area sysops to discuss business, known as SYSOP. Another called TECH soon followed. Several public echos soon followed, including GAYNET and CLANG. These spawned hundreds of new echos, and led to the creation of the Echomail Conference List (Echolist) by Thomas Kenny in January 1987. Echomail produced world-spanning shared forums, and its traffic volume quickly surpassed

1462-432: A unique set of addresses, avoiding potential routing conflicts and ambiguities for systems that belonged to more than one network. FidoNet addresses explicitly consist of a zone number, a network number (or region number), and a node number. They are written in the form Zone:Network/Node . The FidoNet structure also allows for semantic designation of region, host, and hub status for particular nodes, but this status

1548-486: A zero. Systems running existing versions of the software already ignored the fields containing the new addressing, so they would continue to work as before; when noticing a message addressed to another node they would look it up and call that system. Newer systems would recognize the network number and instead deliver that message to the network host. To ensure backward compatibility, existing systems retained their original node numbers through this period. A huge advantage of

1634-518: Is not directly indicated by the main address. For example, consider a node located in Tulsa, Oklahoma , United States with an assigned node number is 918, located in Zone 1 (North America), Region 19, and Network 170. The full FidoNet address for this system would be 1:170/918 . The region was used for administrative purposes, and was only part of the address if the node was listed directly underneath

1720-423: Is that, as with films, these stock characters can incorporate racial stereotypes , and "prejudicial and demeaning images". One concern raised with these gay stock characters is they tend to be shown as just advice-giving "sidekicks" who are not truly integrated into the narrative; as well, the gay character's life is not depicted, apart from their advice-giving interactions with the main characters. This also echoed

1806-432: Is the zone, which is largely continent-based: Each zone is broken down into regions, which are broken down into nets, which consist of individual nodes. Zones 7-4095 are used for othernets ; groupings of nodes that use Fido-compatible software to carry their own independent message areas without being in any way controlled by FidoNet's political structure. Using un-used zone numbers would ensure that each network would have

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1892-474: The Commodore 64 world, and AlterNet . Late in the evolution of the FidoNet system, there was a proposal to allow mail (but not forum messages) from these systems to switch into the FidoNet structure. This was not adopted, and the rapid rise of the internet made this superfluous as these networks rapidly added internet exchange, which acted as a lingua franca . FidoNet started in 1984 and listed 100 nodes by

1978-444: The attachment of a single file to every message. This led to a series of piggyback protocols that built additional features onto FidoNet by passing information back and forth as file attachments. These included the automated distribution of files and transmission of data for inter-BBS games. By far the most commonly used of these piggyback protocols was Echomail , public discussions similar to Usenet newsgroups in nature. Echomail

2064-482: The science fantasy Star Wars saga, or Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter series. More recent works sometimes also move away from the archetype's mythic origins in favour of historical allusions to infamous conquerors and dictators such as Julius Caesar or Adolf Hitler . Dark lord figures are characterized by aspirations to power and identification with some fundamental force of evil or chaos, such as

2150-574: The 15 systems running by the start of June 1984, 5 of them were in St. Louis. A user on Jennings's system in San Francisco that addressed emails to different systems in St. Louis would cause calls to be made to each of those BBSes in turn. In the United States, local calls were normally free, and in most other countries were charged at a low rate. Additionally, the initial call setup, generally

2236-405: The 1990s with the " street-smart Brother " and the "camera-happy Japanese tourist". Other groups more frequently represented as stock characters include women, Native Americans, Hispanics, Arabs, Gays/Lesbians, Jews, and Italians. Other briefly popular stock characters include the 1950s "overweight Communist cell leader" and the 1970s " Black Panther revolutionary". Even in timeless occupations,

2322-727: The CBBS onto this machine. The Rainbow contained two processors , an Intel 8088 and a Zilog Z80 , allowing it to run both MS-DOS and CP/M , with the BBS running on the latter. When the machine arrived, they learned that the Z80 side had no access to the I/O ports , so CBBS could not communicate with a modem . While searching for software that would run on the MS-DOS side of the system, Baker learned of Fido through Madill. The Fido software required changes to

2408-619: The Evil Overlord List, were developed concurrently. Both were published to the Web in the early 1990s. The original, if lesser-known list was compiled in 1990 by members of the now-defunct FidoNet Science Fiction and Fandom (SFFAN) email echo. The FidoNet list originated with a 1988 Saturday Night Live skit featuring Bond Villains touting a book What Not to Do When You Capture James Bond . The FidoNet list arose out of discussions regarding what sort of advice might be in that book, and

2494-598: The Evil Overlord's Accountant , and Starfleet captains. In Australia, a minor literary scandal erupted in 1997 when it emerged that award-winning author Helen Darville plagiarised the list for her regular column in Brisbane 's The Courier-Mail newspaper, which led to her being fired. Teresa Nielsen Hayden , author and lecturer, uses an expanded version of the list in her lectures on writing science fiction. She recommends selecting five random clichés from

2580-459: The US into ten regions that they felt would have roughly equal populations. By May, Jennings had early versions of the new software running. These early versions specified the routing manually through a new ROUTE.BBS file that listed network hosts for each node. For instance, an operator might want to forward all mail to St. Louis through a single node, node 10. ROUTE.BBS would then include a list of all

2666-415: The administration of FidoNet nodes and resolve disputes between members. The rules of conduct are summed up into these two deliberately vague principles: Network coordinators are responsible for managing the individual nodes within their area, usually a city or similar sized area. Regional coordinators are responsible for managing the administration of the network coordinators within their region, typically

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2752-459: The audience. In the late 1990s, there was a trend for screenwriters to add a gay stock character, which replaced the 1980s era's "African-American workplace pal" stock character. In the 1990s, a number of sitcoms introduced gay stock characters with the quality of the depictions being viewed as setting a new bar for onscreen LGBT depiction. One challenge with the use of stock characters in TV shows

2838-529: The best-known parodies of bad SF/F writing, frequently referenced online. It was originally The Top 100 Things I'd Do If I Ever Became an Evil Overlord , but grew to include over 100 entries. Anspach and Butler acknowledge the existence of each other's lists, and state that their two lists have been so cross-pollinated over the years as to become effectively identical. The Evil Overlord List has led to spin-offs, including lists for stock characters including (but not limited to) heroes , henchmen , sidekicks ,

2924-464: The bulletin board software on each end being responsible for ensuring that only the intended recipient could read it. Due to the hobbyist nature of the network, any privacy between the sender and recipient was only the result of politeness from the owners of the FidoNet systems involved in the mail's transfer. It was common, however, for system operators to reserve the right to review the content of mail that passed through their system. Netmail allowed for

3010-616: The calling system would upload its packet, download a return packet if there was one, and disconnect. FIDONET would then unpack the return packet, place the received messages into the local system's database, and move onto the next packet. When there were no remaining packets, FIDONET would exit, and run the FIDO BBS program. In order to lower long-distance charges, the mail exchanges were timed to run late at night, normally 4 AM. This would later be known as national mail hour , and, later still, as Zone Mail Hour . By June 1984, Version 7 of

3096-544: The character of Sauron in J. R. R. Tolkien 's epic fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings , from which the archetype most often takes its name. Later The Silmarillion would focus on the character of Morgoth , of whom Sauron was the principal lieutenant and then successor, while other works would further popularize and diversify the concept with antagonists such as Darkseid in the DC Universe , Emperor Palpatine in

3182-483: The characteristics of stock characters in a story, whether it be a book , play , or film . FidoNet FidoNet is a worldwide computer network that is used for communication between bulletin board systems (BBSes). It uses a store-and-forward system to exchange private (email) and public (forum) messages between the BBSes in the network, as well as other files and protocols in some cases. The FidoNet system

3268-403: The core group brought up 10C, and most Fido systems had upgraded within a few months. The process went much smoother than anyone imagined, and very few nodes had any problems. Sometime during the evolution of Fido, file attachments were added to the system, allowing a file to be referenced from an email message. During the normal exchange between two instances of FIDONET, any files attached to

3354-490: The costs were attempted, all of which caused friction in the groups. The problems were so bad that Jennings came to refer to the system as the "fight-o-net". As modems reached speeds of 28.8 kbit/s, dial-up Internet became increasingly common. By 1995, the bulletin board market was reeling as users abandoned local BBS systems in favour of a subscription to a local Internet Provider, which allowed access to worldwide internet services, such as HTTP, internet mail and so on, for

3440-423: The dark lord archetype in literature can often reflect the belief "that evil in the real world is usually embodied in a single person and requires a high position to be effective" and that this contrasts with Hannah Arendt 's notion of the banality of evil . In part due to the literary popularity of dark lords in fiction, science fiction and fantasy fans have collected several satirical lists of resolutions for

3526-428: The earliest standards. File attachments followed the normal mail routing through multiple systems and could back up transfers all along the line as the files were copied. Additionally, users could send files to other users and rack up long-distance charges on a host systems. For these reasons, file transfers were normally turned off for most users, and only available to the system operators and tosser/scanners. A solution

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3612-467: The early 1990s, combined with the rapid decrease in price of computer systems and storage, made BBSes increasingly popular. By the mid-1990s there were almost 40,000 FidoNet systems in operation, and it was possible to communicate with millions of users around the world. Only UUCPNET came close in terms of breadth or numbers; FidoNet's user base far surpassed other networks like BITNET . The broad availability of low-cost Internet connections starting in

3698-563: The email database for any messages with a number in this field. FIDONET collected all of the messages for a particular node number into a file known as a message packet . After all the packets were generated, one for each node, the FIDONET program would look up the destination node's phone number in NODELIST.BBS, and call the remote system. Provided that FIDONET was running on that system, the two systems would handshake and, if this succeeded,

3784-477: The end of that year. Steady growth continued through the 1980s, but a combination of factors led to rapid growth after 1988. These included faster and less expensive modems and rapidly declining costs of hard drives and computer systems in general. By April 1993, the FidoNet nodelist contained over 20,000 systems. At that time it was estimated that each node had, on average, about 200 active users. Of these 4 million users in total, 2 million users commonly used echomail,

3870-511: The file to be copied multiple times. Two such standards became common, "WaZOO" and "Bark", which saw varying support among different mailers. Both worked similarly, with the mailer calling the remote system and sending a new handshake packet to request the files. Although FidoNet was, by far, the best known BBS-based network, it was by no means the only one. From 1988 on, PCBoard systems were able to host similar functionality known as RelayNet , while other popular networks included RBBSNet from

3956-469: The first minute of the call, was normally billed at a higher rate than continuing an existing connection. Therefore, it would be less expensive to deliver all the messages from all the users in San Francisco to all of the users in St. Louis in a single call. Packets were generally small enough to be delivered within a minute or two, so delivering all the messages in a single call could greatly reduce costs by avoiding multiple first-minute charges. Once delivered,

4042-575: The first version of the FidoNet software in June 1984. In early 1985 he wrote a document explaining the operations of the FidoNet, along with a short portion on the history of the system. In this version, FidoNet was developed as a way to exchange mail between the first two Fido BBS systems, Jennings' and Madill's, to "see if it could be done, merely for the fun of it". This was first supported in Fido V7, "sometime in June 84 or so". In early 1984, Ben Baker

4128-492: The global list. At a meeting held in Kaplan's living room in St. Louis on 11 April 1985 the various parties hammered out all of the details of the new concept. As part of this meeting, they also added the concept of a region , a purely administrative level that was not part of the addressing scheme. Regional hosts would handle any stragglers in the network maps, remote systems that had no local network hosts. They then divided up

4214-462: The known systems in that area, with instructions to forward mail to each of those nodes through node 10. This process was later semi-automated by John Warren's NODELIST program. Over time, this information was folded into updated versions of the nodelist format, and the ROUTES file is no longer used. A new version of FIDO and FIDONET, 10C, was released containing all of these features. On 12 June 1985

4300-490: The list, and using them, or their reverse ("Say you've drawn A-34, 'I will not turn into a snake. It never helps.' You can have a character turn into a snake and find it doesn't help, or do it and find it very useful indeed") as the basis for a plot. Stock character A stock character , also known as a character archetype , is a type of character in a narrative (e.g. a novel, play, television show, or film) whom audiences recognize across many narratives or as part of

4386-433: The message in while on a long-distance telephone connection. Jennings responded by calling into Baker's system that night and uploading a new version of the software consisting of three files: FIDO_DECV6, a new version of the BBS program itself, FIDONET, a new program, and NODELIST.BBS, a text file. The new version of FIDO BBS had a timer that caused it to exit at a specified time, normally at night. As it exited it would run

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4472-461: The messages in the packets were delivered after the packet itself had been up or downloaded. It is not clear when this was added, but it was already a feature of the basic system when the 8 February 1985 version of the FidoNet standards document was released, so this was added very early in Fido's history. At a sysop meeting in Dallas, the idea was raised that it would be nice if there was some way for

4558-496: The mid-1990s lessened the need for FidoNet's store-and-forward system, as any system in the world could be reached for equal cost. Direct dialing into local BBS systems rapidly declined. Although FidoNet has shrunk considerably since the late 1990s, it has remained in use even today despite internet connectivity becoming more widespread. There are two major accounts of the development of the FidoNet, differing only in small details. Around Christmas 1983, Tom Jennings started work on

4644-419: The net/node addressing scheme was also useful for reducing communications costs between continents, where time zone differences on either end of the connection might also come into play. For instance, the best time to forward mail in the US was at night, but that might not be the best time for European hosts to exchange. Efforts towards introducing a continental level to the addressing system started in 1986. At

4730-445: The netmail from all of the systems in their network, then re-package it into single packets destined to each network. They would then call any required network admin sites and deliver the packet to them. That site would then process the mail as normal, although all of the messages in the packet would be guaranteed to be local calls. The network address was placed in an unused field in the Fido message database, which formerly always held

4816-481: The new scheme was that node numbers were now unique only within their network, not globally. This meant the previous 250 node limit was gone, but for a variety of reasons this was initially limited to about 1,200. This change also devolved the maintenance of the nodelists down to the network hosts, who then sent updated lists back to Node 51 to be collected into the master list. The St. Louis group now had to only maintain their own local network, and do basic work to compile

4902-410: The normal netmail scan, but these files were then compressed and attached to a normal netmail message as an attachment. This message was then sent to a special address on the remote system. After receiving netmail as normal, the scanner on the remote system looked for these messages, unpacked them, and put them into the same public forum on the original system. In this fashion, Rush's system implemented

4988-494: The origin system's name and address. After that, each system that the message traveled through added itself to a growing PATH header, as well as a SEENBY header. SEENBY prevented the message from looping around the network in the case of misconfigured routing information. Echomail was not the only system to use the file attachment feature of netmail to implement store-and-forward capabilities. Similar concepts were used by online games and other systems as well. The evolution towards

5074-414: The original netmail system. By the early 1990s, echo mail was carrying over 8 MB of compressed message traffic a day, many times that when uncompressed. Echomail did not necessarily use the same distribution pathways as normal netmail, and the distribution routing was stored in a separate setup file not unlike the original ROUTES.BBS. At the originating site a header line was added to the message indicating

5160-402: The overhead of nodelist maintenance was desirable. In October 1986 the last major change to the FidoNet network was released, adding zones and points . Zones represented major geographical areas roughly corresponding to continents. There were six zones in total, North America, South America, Europe, Oceania, Asia, and Africa. Points represented non-public nodes, which were created privately on

5246-577: The overlap between these concepts. Nevertheless, these terms are not synonyms. The relationship is that basic archetypes (such as " hero " or " father figure ") and stock characters (such as " damsel in distress " and " wise fool ") are the raw source material that authors use to build on and create fleshed-out, interesting characters. In contrast, stereotypes and clichés are generally viewed as signs of "bad writing or shallow thinking". Some stereotypes, such as racial stereotype characters, may be offensive to readers or viewers. According to Dwight V. Swain ,

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5332-547: The packet would be broken out into separate packets for local systems, and delivered using multiple local free calls. The team settled on the concept of adding a new network number patterned on the idea of area codes . A complete network address would now consist of the network and node number pair, which would be written with a slash between them. All mail travelling between networks would first be sent to their local network host , someone who volunteered to pay for any long-distance charges. That single site would collect up all

5418-574: The person in the job has changed, reflecting cultural and demographic changes. In the 1990s, a hairdresser (previously French) was often depicted as a gay man, a gardener (previously White) as Asian or Hispanic, a bartender (previously White) as Black, and a maid (previously Black) as Hispanic. Due to the scheduling constraints on television production, in which episodes need to be quickly scripted and shot, television scriptwriters often depend heavily on stock characters borrowed from popular film. TV writers use these stock characters to quickly communicate to

5504-456: The plays' comic business and royal pomp." Tara Brabazon discusses how the "school ma'am on the colonial frontier has been a stock character of literature and film in Australia and the United States. She is an ideal foil for the ill mannered, uncivilised hero. In American literature and film, the spinster from East – generally Boston – has some stock attributes." Polly Welts Kaufman shows that

5590-455: The same cost as accessing a local BBS system. Many BBS sysops became Internet Service Providers. Their Internet gateways also made FidoNet less expensive to implement, because inter-net transfers could be delivered over the Internet as well, at little or no marginal cost. But this seriously diluted the entire purpose of the store-and-forward model, which had been built up specifically to address

5676-426: The same time, it was noted that some power users were interested in using FidoNet protocols as a way of delivering the large quantities of echomail to their local machines where it could be read offline. These users did not want their systems to appear in the nodelist - they did not (necessarily) run a bulletin board system and were not publicly accessible. A mechanism allowing netmail delivery to these systems without

5762-461: The schoolma'am's " genteel poverty , unbending morality, education, and independent ways make her character a useful foil for the two other female stock characters in Western literature: the prostitute with the heart of gold and the long-suffering farmer's wife.'" Stock characters can be further identified as an alazon , the "impostor and self-deceiving braggart" in a story, or an eiron ,

5848-530: The sense of typical roles in the dramas, but also with other female persons in the area of the theatrical stage..." Andrew Griffin, Helen Ostovich, and Holger Schott Syme explain further that "Female stock characters also permit a close level of audience identification; this is true most of all in The Troublesome Reign , where the "weeping woman" type is used to dramatic advantage. This stock character provides pathos as yet another counterpoint to

5934-408: The separate FIDONET program. NODELIST was the list of Fido BBS systems, which Jennings had already been compiling. The FIDONET program was what later became known as a mailer . The FIDO BBS software was modified to use a previously unused numeric field in the message headers to store a node number for the machine to which the message should be delivered to. When FIDONET ran, it would search through

6020-713: The serial drivers to work properly on the Rainbow. A porting effort started, involving Jennings, Madill and Baker. This caused all involved to rack up considerable long-distance charges as they all called each other during development, or called into each other's BBSes to leave email. During one such call "in May or early June", Baker and Jennings discussed how great it would be if the BBS systems could call each other automatically, exchanging mail and files between them. This would allow them to compose mail on their local machines, and then deliver it quickly, as opposed to calling in and typing

6106-482: The shared public forums, while about 200,000 used the private netmail system. At its peak, FidoNet listed approximately 39,000 systems. Throughout its lifetime, FidoNet was beset with management problems and infighting. Much of this can be traced to the fact that the inter-net delivery cost real money, and the traffic grew more rapidly than decreases caused by improving modem speeds and downward trending long-distance rates. As they increased, various methods of recouping

6192-566: The size of a state, or small country. Zone coordinators are responsible for managing the administration of all of the regions within their zone. The world is divided into six zones, the coordinators of which elect one of themselves to be the International Coordinator of FidoNet. FidoNet was historically designed to use modem-based dial-up access between bulletin board systems, and much of its policy and structure reflected this. The FidoNet system officially referred only to

6278-471: The story along more efficiently, by allowing the audience to already understand the character and their motivations. Furthermore, stock characters can be used to build an audience's expectations and, in some cases, they can also enhance narrative elements like suspense, irony, or plot twists if those expectations end up subverted. There is often confusion between stock characters, archetypes , stereotypes , and clichés . In part this confusion arises due to

6364-406: The sysops to post messages that would be shared among the systems. In February 1986 Jeff Rush, one of the group members, introduced a new mailer that extracted messages from public forums that the sysop selected, similar to the way the original mailer handled private messages. The new program was known as a tosser/scanner . The tosser produced a file that was similar (or identical) to the output from

6450-426: The system was being run in production, and nodes were rapidly being added to the network. By August there were almost 30 systems in the nodelist, 50 by September, and over 160 by January 1985. As the network grew, the maintenance of the nodelist became prohibitive, and errors were common. In these cases, people would start receiving phone calls at 4 AM, from a caller that would say nothing and then hang up. In other cases

6536-515: The system would be listed before it was up and running, resulting in long-distance calls that accomplished nothing. In August 1984, Jennings handed off control of the nodelist to the group in St. Louis, mostly Ken Kaplan and Ben Baker. Kaplan had come across Fido as part of finding a BBS solution for his company, which worked with DEC computers and had been given a Rainbow computer and a USRobotics 1200bit/s modem . From then on, joining FidoNet required one to set up their system and use it to deliver

6622-426: The transfer of Netmail —the individual private messages between people using bulletin boards—including the protocols and standards with which to support it. A netmail message would contain the name of the person sending, the name of the intended recipient, and the respective FidoNet addresses of each. The FidoNet system was responsible for routing the message from one system to the other (details below), with

6708-416: The user can telnet to any BBS worldwide as cheaply as ones next door. Also, Usenet and internet mail has been added, along with long file names to many newer versions of BBS software, some being freeware , resulting in increasing use. Nodelists are no longer declining in all cases. FidoNet is governed in a hierarchical structure according to FidoNet policy, with designated coordinators at each level to manage

6794-415: The way that Black and Latino characters were used in 1980s and early 1990s shows: they were given a stock character role as a police chief, which in put them in a position of power, but then these characters were used as minor characters, with little narrative interaction with main characters. In the 2000s, with changing views on depicting race, Latino/a characters are both typecast into stock characters and

6880-490: The writers play with viewer expectations by making a seemingly stock Latino/a character act or behave "against type". Southern sheriff stock characters are depicted with a negative stereotype of being obese, poorly trained, uneducated, and racist, as was done with Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane from The Dukes of Hazzard . In the United States , courts have determined that copyright protection cannot be extended to

6966-423: Was added to the nodelist. The first new nodelist was published on 21 September 1984. Growth continued to accelerate, and by the spring of 1985, the system was already reaching its limit of 250 nodes. In addition to the limits on the growth of what was clearly a popular system, nodelist maintenance continued to grow more and more time-consuming. It was also realized that Fido systems were generally clustered – of

7052-528: Was based on several small interacting programs, only one of which needed to be ported to support other BBS software. FidoNet was one of the few networks that was supported by almost all BBS software, as well as a number of non-BBS online services . This modular construction also allowed FidoNet to easily upgrade to new data compression systems, which was important in an era using modem -based communications over telephone links with high long-distance calling charges. The rapid improvement in modem speeds during

7138-435: Was compiled and published by Jack Butler. It predated the following list, but was only widely published later, and is the more obscure of the two. The later-produced and more famous version of the list was compiled in 1994 by Peter Anspach (hence it is occasionally titled "Peter's Evil Overlord List") based on informal discussions at conventions and on online bulletin boards in the early 1990s, and has subsequently become one of

7224-410: Was offered in the form of file requests . This reversed the flow of information, instead of being driven by the sending systems, these were driven by the calling system. This meant it was the receiver, the user trying to get the file, that paid for the connection. Additionally, requests were directly routed using one-time point-to-point connections instead of the traditional routing, so they did not cause

7310-604: Was planning on starting a BBS for the newly forming computer club at the McDonnell Douglas automotive division in St. Louis . Baker was part of the CP/M special interest group within the club. He intended to use the seminal, CP/M-hosted, CBBS system, and went looking for a machine to run it on. The club's president told Baker that DEC would be giving them a Rainbow 100 computer on indefinite loan, so he made plans to move

7396-402: Was supported by a variety of software that collected up new messages from the local BBSes' public forums (the scanner ), compressed it using ARC or ZIP , attached the resulting archive to a Netmail message, and sent that message to a selected system. On receiving such a message, identified because it was addressed to a particular user , the reverse process was used to extract the messages, and

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