What FidoNet can teach Green Computing

For a couple of decades, especially maybe from 2000-2020, the area of Computing largely ignored any issues of environmental sustainability impact. It's an industry joke that increasing layers of abstraction have rendered the astonishing advances in computing hardware in processing and memory to something of a standstill. And yet, it is predicted that digital emissions could be 14% of global admissions by 2040. While many stripes of engineers have been working to reduce the carbon emissions from concrete and aerospace, a generation of software engineers has been passively taught to consider sustainability as a "hardware problem".

The Zenith of FidoNet

So, what is FidoNet and how does it feature in this conversation. FidoNet is, or it might be more honest to say was, an immensely impactful network of computing systems. In its heyday, in the mid 1990s, it was the second largest network in the world, with 40,000 nodes across the planet, supporting the communication of millions of users. FidoNet dwindled in popularity as the domestic Internet became commonplace, but it is often now described in retrospect as the first ever social network. FidoNet still exists, but now I think its fair to say it does so only for its hobbyists, whereas in the 1990s it was run by such people, and commercial interests, but facilitated the communication needs of the more general public.

I should declare an interest at this point. I was one of those people who ran FidoNet systems. For many years I ran "The Heart of Gold" (a hitchhikers reference) bulletin board system on two phone lines and then two ISDN lines. My addresses were 2:443/13 and 2:443/14 for those curious souls who remember such addressing. And for a time I was 2:2/20, the chair of the FidoNet Technical Standards Committee - a group of elected developers who oversaw the technology than underpinned FidoNet and many other, often themed, FidoNet Technology Networks (FTN). Looking back this was excellent practice for leadership in Higher Education - trying to lead a group of internationally diverse astoundingly smart people who had many other interests and demands on their time.

Abundance is an enemy of Creativity

What made FidoNet special, was that resources were exceptionally limited. We had relatively little processing power and memory. We ran communication lines with bandwidths of 300 bps (bits per second). That is not a typo. As the years went on engineers pushed the absolute limits of how much data could be pushed down a plain old telephone line, largely settling around 56 kbps. But lots of users still had slower modems, and systems had to facilitate all sorts of speeds and connections. As someone who beta tested modems, I listened to connection signatures all day every day, only sliding down volume sliders at night, and sometimes not even then.

The point is: every byte mattered. And to a lesser extent, processor cycles and memory usage mattered. 640K of memory seemed a lot for those of us who started off writing software with 32K, or even 1K, but we had to develop software somewhat constrained by that ceiling even after computer memories increased into megabytes (but many years from gigabytes). Compilers produced executables with stack sizes of 3K. Many modern developers may not even understand why that would matter. Disk space was relatively expensive. We were constrained in ways that perhaps only embedded systems engineers really understand now.

Add to that that FidoNet email was a "store and forward" system, with emails hopping through potentially many systems from source to destination and with everyone sharing the costs. The faster the modem, the shorter the transmission time, the less expensive the "phone call" but it all added up.

Frugality and Etiquette

This all had an important impact on behaviour. Or at least in most people's. If you were replying to an email, you clipped out the context that was strictly necessary for your reply, if that was needed at all. This often led to elegant, multiply indented threads of conversation but where hopefully every email read from top to bottom gave enough understanding of context to quickly comprehend the issues and enable a response.

So I was horrified when modern email etiquette was turned, literally, on its head by the habit of "top-posting". I'm looking at you, Outlook. Most modern Internet users probably don't understand that this is a thing at all.

Consider for a moment, the impact of one of the world's most popular email programs making it almost impossible to do anything other than bolting your reply on top of the previous message, even if that's just to add "Me too" at the top of an email you are replying to and send it back. The end result is horrifically incomprehensible. How many times have we had the experience of receiving an email and have to scroll down to the very bottom email within an email and awkwardly read down and then scroll up to the next message and read down again and so on. It also means that even though modern (and older) email editors are effective at recording the threading of messages almost every email is a larger russian doll incorporating the russian doll of all those that came before it. And all of those preceding messages are stored independently as well.

The frugality of FidoNet would never have allowed such a thing, indeed, transmitting the entirety of an original email being replied to, with "Me too" added at the top would have been considered the height of poor manners.

Most of us, even those of us who know better, and remember a more civilised age now resign ourselves to top-posting, but it's worth considering for a moment, how disastrously this one decision in one editor has impacted email storage of trillions of emails across the world. The sheer number of wasted terabytes should make us all shudder. Social norms can have big impacts, and it's no longer practical to swim against the tide of top posting without causing great confusion in those you are communicating with. We need a reset of such norms if that can even be possible now thousands of email programs have copied and reinforced Outlook's terrible example.

Many of us had the same shrinking feeling, even if that was all that was shrinking, when the world moved from a text email norm, to an HTML email norm. This is what has enabled fonts, formatting and images in email today. Most of us have to live in that norm in our working lives, but these small decisions, multiplied by billions or even trillions become consequential. HTML (the formatting language of the World Wide Web) itself, and the computing resources to render it, must now be considered problematic by its sheer scale of usage.

The Legacy of Text

On the other hand, the Internet was very much built on text, and 7-bit ASCII text at that. The observant will notice that there are 8 bits in a byte, but a large proportion of the underbelly of the Internet runs on 7-bit text. Attaching an 8-bit binary file to an email means that this file needs to be encoded into 7-bit text, a process originally taken forward by "uuencoding" and later "base64". The details don't really matter, but if you have ever examined the source of an email with an attached file you will see huge amounts of this encoded text. Generally speaking, every such file is encoded to be one third bigger than the original. So what, one might ask? But multiplying up that choice for every file in an email on the planet, and the processing time to encode and decode starts to matter.

SMTP - the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol which is behind almost all Internet email transmission on the planet dates back to about 1980. FidoNet is a little younger, dating to around 1983. But FidoNet had a different way of considering attached binary data and used all 8-bits of the byte. Maybe it was that frugality, maybe it was a happy accident, but perhaps the Internet has something to learn from its younger cousin.

SMTP is, in retrospect, hopelessly naive as a protocol. Its designers had a charming "Garden of Eden" sensibility, not forseeing the evil of spam (unsolicited email) they never considered the need to authenticate a sender or check which systems should be authorised to send on another's behalf. Immense effort has been expended in trying to augment the standard to prevent spam and phishing (fradulently trying to engage a recipient in some way) with standards like SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Looking around, it is difficult to say that this is really very successful. Spam is annoying, and phishing causes a great deal of misery in people's lives, but on top of that the environmental impact of trillions of unwanted emails must be considered.

In 2022, according to one analysis, 49% of the world's email was spam, 162 billion spam emails were sent every day. Regardless of the societal impact, can we really afford the sustainability cost of this?

Integration Matters

Integral calculus tells us, what common sense sometimes doesn't, that when you add up very many very small things, it can really matter. In the 1980s and 1990s every byte mattered in a lot of the non-Internet-enabled world, and in the 2020s we often struggle to think that a single megabyte matters, but issues of protocol design, and issues of human behaviour can mean that we need to rethink our assumptions, and whether we can still afford not to.