[Novalug] Reminiscing about times I was too young to remember!

Geoff McNamara geoffm@companionway.net
Tue Oct 16 08:06:31 EDT 2012


I ran RBBS under Desqview (a great DOS multitasking app by the way - and 
DesqviewX was ahead of its time [used an X desktop] on the DOS platform 
but Windows successfully killed that). Desqview had a great desktop 
macro record/playback built-in tool that I still miss today... there are 
some similar tools around but none have met my needs as well as the 
original did. I wrote C programs to transfer messages (extending RBBS) 
from or into news groups from the internet and to copy files from or to 
Novell Netware.  I posted the 10 or so diskette images on the BBS of the 
original linux code when it came out. I compiled them over and over but 
it wasn't until Yggrasil and then Slackware where the drive1rs became 
advanced enough to run "most" of the common hardware with stability.
Lot of good lessons learned during those days - BBS competition for 
"eyes" was fierce - if your were down for 10 minutes you would lose 
"customers" for ever.  And the legal battle that erupted over ARC vs ZIP 
showed the incredible power of free "as in beer" software - within two 
weeks after the company SeaArc? legally won their battle with Phil Katz 
over PKZIP every BBS switched from ARC files to (PK) ZIP files - SeaARC 
won the legal battle but completely lost their war pretty much over night.

On 10/15/2012 07:36 PM, Dave Aronson wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 5:28 PM, The Doctor <drwho@virtadpt.net> wrote:
>
>> did anyone on this list run BBSes with Linux when
>> BBSes were still around?
> Yup!  Under dosemu, once I moved to Linux, from OS/2....
>
> The author of the package I used (Maximus) SAID he was going to
> release the source, so someone could port it to Linux, but AFAIK
> neither ever happened, at least not before Teh Intarweb effectively
> killed off BBSes.
>
> -Dave
>




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