About Me

About this Website

History

Digital Dilemma is a name used by it’s creator, Simon Avery, since 1990 relating to computer related services.

Early 1990s – Round Corner Software / Digital Dilemma

I founded and ran a Shareware company that distributed cassette tapes and 3″ 178Kb disks of Public Domain / Shareware Software for the Amstrad CPC. Some of it was my own text adventures, but mostly other peoples’ games. Back then, this was the standard way to distribute software that wasn’t on sale in the local shops. People would request some titles, I’d copy them to either cassette tape or 3" floppy Disks for the Amstrad CPC and post them off in a jiffy bag, charging around £3 a diskfull. It was never meant to make money, just to cover the postage costs.

Early 1990s to around 2005 – Digital Dilemma BBS. Also Fidonet 2:255/90 and 2:255/0

When I first upgraded my 1200/75 modem to a 14.4kbps one, I started to run a BBS. This required renting a dedicated phone line from BT (not a cheap thing back then). It was fun to listen to the click of the modem when it answered a call and then go and see what the user was doing. Whether they were downloading files, playing one of the Door Games like Legend of the Green Dragon, or reading messages.

I eventually got further into messaging and ran a point system from another BBS. From there, I applied and was granted my own node number, 2:255/90 (UK, Regional Southwest). Fidonet mail was generally sorted into different topics and each downlink would require an archive created containing the mail topics they’d subscribed to, plus any direct email (called netmail) for them or their users. Because every phone call was chargeable, this was optimised and automated to be as efficient as possible. Highly compressed files created ready to be collected and even with the low linespeeds of the day, a typical send and receive would be done in a few seconds. We don’t need that level of efficiency nowadays, with fast, always-on connections. I still have some software I wrote to help this available here.

There were also multiple other mail networks, many specialist-interest or more lax than Fidonet’s rather stuffy rules – topics were always moderated and kept on-topic. (With the exception of CONTROV, a lawless wild place!) I forget the name of many of them now – but Landnet was one, and Blush Response ran its own network, BlushNet and I’m still in touch with some people from there even now.

Sometimes around 2000, the main UK Mail Coordinator, John Burden, retired through ill health and I took over the role. He had run a Midnight Line to bring mail into the UK and send it out to other countries. A Midnight Line was a product sold by BT where, for a few hours after midnight, phone calls anywhere were not directly charged. Instead, you paid a fixed fee and I understand that was considerable - well over a thousand pounds a year, I did hear around £5,000, and that was in the 1990s. That this was considered cheaper just to make unlimited calls for a short time each day gives an indication how expensive international phone calls were at the time. It certainly provided incentive to optimise the technology and the tightly compressed packets were more efficient even that today’s compression on the fly. Zipped mail would generally be a few hundred KB/day between countries, and at 14.4kbps, a marginal improvement on file size, negotiation or handover saved real money.

By the time I stepped up to import national email, ISDN was available for home use and Digital Dilemma had BT’s Home Highway product, which allowed for 2x 64kbps simultaneous, bonded connections (for the cost of two phone calls!). This was much superior for data transfer as not only was it faster than the fastest 56kbps modem, there was no lengthy modem negotiation. ISDN connected within 1 second and the entire call was often over by the time a normal modem had finished connecting - which was important when you were paying by the second!

Eventually, Fidonet throughput trickled away as people moved onto the internet and sometime around 2005 when it was only getting 2 or 3 calls a day, I closed Digital Dilemma, cancelled Home Highway and managed to get an always on ADSL connection at 512/128 kbps. Not having to dial up to connect to the internet and remember you were no longer being billed per minute felt like a huge thing.

Websites

The first Digital Dilemma website appeared on the internet around 1995 as a free btinternet site. I didn’t register the digdilem.org domain until 2001.(Verifiable by Whois)

This Website

This iteration of Digital Dilemma is built using:

Process: I write the site locally using VSCode, using hugo serve to review a local version and when I’m happy, deploy it to Cloudflare Pages using Wrangler. Immediately after, a copy is also deployed to Github for posterity.

Digital Dilemma in the past

It’s 2025 and there’s been a website here for around thirty years.

The method has changed, such as;

  • Hand written HTML hosted on BTInterenet home pages
  • Dreamweaver HTML
  • Wordpress on a VPS
  • Jekyll hosted on Github
  • Wordpress hosted via Cloudflare Tunnel on my home server

There’s no formal company, product or service attached to Digital Dilemma. I use digdilem as a nick in a great many places and I’ve generally provided this site, in some form or another, mostly to house a few projects and share some information.

I hope this is useful in some small way.

There is no explicit cookie opt-in page. Awful things. I’m not commercially exploiting this information and there is no tracking necessary for the website to work.

Simple web stats are collected using Umami which has a GDPR Statement stating that opt-in is not required.

Thus, these pages are considered to fall under the exception clause in DIRECTIVE 2002/58/EC OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL, Art. 5(3)