An email system developed in 1984 by Tom Jennings, creator of the Fido BBS. FidoNet was the first popular method of providing email and file transfer across multiple bulletin boards (BBSs). FidoNet, as well as all BBS use, declined dramatically in the U.S. after the Internet exploded in the 1990s, but FidoNet grew in other countries. Today, there are approximately two thousand FidoNet nodes in use around the world, many of which are used to provide an email connection to the Internet. See
BBS.