A Fidonet point was a kind of private BBS system, that interfaced directly with other Fidonet BBS's. This meant that mail exchanges were much more efficient - the BBS you were a point of created ready-to-download compressed mail and echomail bundles for you, so that you did not need to manually login or do anything else than launch a batch script to force mail synchronization.

A Fidonet point was made of different pieces of software - tipically BinkleyTerm as mailer with its fossil driver, Squish as a message base manager, tosser and packer, and something like Gold Editor or even Maximus BBS to read and write messages. In some sense, a point was simply another BBS without the need to respect the sacred ZMH, a slightly different Fidonet address, no inbound telephone lines and usually just one or two users.

Setting up a working point often required long hours of hacking, and succeding meant you attained a special status - being one of the "true" Fidonet users, one of the ten-or-so friends of the sysop running a point versus everybody else who dialed the BBS using a terminal emulator. Also, having your name in the REGION.XXX was a bit like being co-opted into the Fidonet intelligentsia.

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