Quote:
Originally Posted by DNSB
I can't resist the temptation to vent over a program that I haven't touched in decades. Way back when, I used a DOS program called Telix with a scripting language called SALT. Worked very nicely but almost every update broke some my scripts which were used for programming some of the machines used in a photofinishing lab. One heck of a lot cheaper than the manufacturer's control device, easier to program and flexible but I finally stopped updating it unless there was a change that I really needed.
That was where I joined the "If it ain't broken, don't fixpack it" crowd.
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I was a Telix user, back when. (And met the original author.) It was the days when going online meant "call a dial up BBS with a modem", and Telix was one of the popular telecom programs, along with things like Crosstalk and Procomm, that you used to do the dialing. Telix had originally been written in C. When the original author stepped away from it, the guy who took it over had to rewrite it in Turbo Pascal to be
able to support and enhance it.
BBSes had aggregated into networks, and I was once a Conference Host for nine conferences on the second largest BBS network in the world, with just under 1,000 nodes.
The largest was Fidonet, with I forget how many thousands of nodes across the world. Fido was an attempt to replicate Usenet in a form usable in single-user, single tasking machines. You ran a front end like BinkleyTerm when were a Fido node. Binkley answered incoming calls, and figured out what it was talking to. If it was another Fido BBS, it initiated a mail transfer, accepting and posting new mail in the message areas your BBS carried, and sending any replies your users had posted to prior mail. If it was a user calling, it called the BBS program to handle the call and allow the user to access the BBS.
Fidonet was standards driven, and if your BBS software implemented the standards, you could be a node on Fidonet, regardless of what machine or BBS software you used.
I was on Relaynet International Message Exchange. Whether your BBS could become a RIME node depended on whether a client existed to handle the communications. Things like RBBS and PCBoard were supported "out of th4ee box". Other things got more complex.
For example, RIME required that people use real names when posting. BBS software like MajorBBS used aliases. So when MajorBBS message were sent to RIME, the client had to dig the user's real name put of the BBS member database to post to RIME under it, and replies to MajorBBS system posters had to do the reverse, and translate the real name being responded to the the alias the user had on the MajorBBS system.
The nice thing about RIME was that their network software supported a form of private messaging. You could route main to a specific node, and make it readable only by the recipient (and the sysop of the BBS they used.) It meant I could do moderation in private. Most of my moderation was public and posted to
all, and took the form of explanations of how to use the features RIME supported, and what the rules were and why they existed. There was a private conference Hosts had to read where people who were unhappy with moderation could complain to the network Steering Committee and moderators complained about would the to respond. I never got a complaint, but did get some private messages praising my efforts, and saying "We're in good hands."
I enjoyed it, but looking back have no idea how I managed it.
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Dennis