What is SupCon anyway?

If you have wandered here by “mistake”, you must surely wonder what the hell this “SupCon” thing really was? Here I'd like to try to answer that question.

SupCon was organized in the last weekend of July between 1995 and 2001, to allow the people who are active in the hobbyist computer network Fidonet meet each other in another way than through electronic communication, throw each other in the extremely hot (note the sarcasm) water of Lake Vättern, and compete against each other in stupid games, such as “matrix printer throwing”, which was a big hit at 1998 year's event.

The first SupCon was organized in 1995 by the then current RC for Fidonet Sweden, Jonny Bergdahl, at Sannabadet, in Jönköping/Huskvarna (also jokingly known as Jönskvarna). It was a big success, and the spectacle was repeated in 1996 by the same organiser.

In 1997, Fidonet Sweden had gotten a new RC, Mats Wallin, who organized the 1997 spectacle. In 1997, the rule that the winners in the SupCon competition as punishment have to arrange next year's SupCon was created. So, in 1998 the first non-RC-organised SupCon took place (not that there usually was much planning, the event mostly just happened).

The 1999 event took place, in accordance with the tradition, in the last weekend of July in Jönköping/Huskvarna. However, unlike previous years, the 2000 event got orders to move (by the cops) to move, and thus only partly took place at Sannabadet.

That withstanding, the 2001 event took place in the same place (it was, after all, still a spot open to the general public), additionally, the author of these pages had moved on to staying at a nearby hotel anyway. With the advent of the Internet, Fidonet started dwindling in the early 2000s, and in 2001, the number of attendants had fallen dramatically, and since then no new SupCons have been arranged (at least as far as I am aware, and I stayed in Fidonet for several years after this). Swedish Fidonet has in much dissipated, even if real enthusiasts remained when I left the network in the early 2010s.

Where the name “SupCon” stems from, and what it means, is wrapped in mystery, some say it comes from the combination “Sysop-User-Point”, other declare that it is the “Support Convention”, and other think that it has no meaning at all (apart from Swedish “supa” that means “booze”).

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