RM> Perhaps Rod (Rod Gasson) can provide a history lesson.
In the beginning (1992), it was dark. There was no such thing as a Native mode 128 Commodore offline mail reader, or a C64 Offline mail reader. It was a heavy topic of discussion on the Fidonet echos and many said it could never be done. The main argument against it was the ability to create archived replies. But the very few programs that let us dissolve other platform archives was also a concern too.
Meanwhile, not knowing it was impossible, Rod wanted to read the mail offline and happened to have a sysop visit him who unzipped the specifications of QWK packets and provided them to Rod. The story goes that while the friend was showering, Rod managed to write a quick BASIC program to read the messages.dat files from QWK packets. That was not even V1, but it was the beginning.
The first released version included the documentation built into the program. It was a BASIC program that I'm not even sure included the ability to reply to files.
The next version did, however, but you had to save messages you wanted to reply to in a separate file and then use another program to reply to the mail. The taglines flashed if an unregistered user sent a message with it. Taglines were in a separate file that you had to edit with a text editor and it also was how you set up your colour preferences and a few other things. It required some weird formatting of text - since it used BASIC, commas in taglines were a real problem. (I only remember that because I found a message between he and I on the subject about a year ago - I'd obviously had a problem with it).
In October (?) 1992 Arthur Moore released QWKie v1, which made a few 64 users very happy.
Version 3.x was an impressive new program. The reply editor and reader were seamed together and one could edit replies and do neat things with taglines and it could export messages to disk in a couple of different ways. It did not require the use of CS-DOS as previous versions had. It had (and continues to have) a built in Zip-store routine so that replies could be packed right from the program and uploaded to the BBS. It also had QPA, which was an external program to ARC store the replies. QPA is still included with the package because it has some addition uses - like CMD users can have the final .REP packet saved to a different directory from their replies directory.
Version 4.x is what we have now. With lots of nice features. One of the biggest being that it worked with CMD drives in terms of allowing different partitions and subdirectories to be used. As I recall, just when v4 went out, I'd just bought an FD drive and discovered it didn't work with QWKRR. That was the first time I spoke to Rod, actually. After I'd sent him the info from my docs, he was able to fix the problem and I convinced him not to do a bug fix release for it (he'd already put out one patch for something else), because I didn't want to forever be telling people about what a great program QWKRR is and then have to tell them where to get the patches for it. <smile> Little did I know. <g>
That was v4.2. Then for six months, he worked on tweaking and added intro's, macros, uuencodes and screen blanking. I was privileged to watch the development of this version, as he sent me new updates once or twice a week and fixed things I found in previous updates. That became v4.3 which was released in June 1994.
So there's your history. Somewhere I have the "update" notes for a few of these versions. It would be interesting sometime to see what was added when.
BTW, this is just from memory, so I may actually <gasp> be wrong on a few of these, but as far as I know it's correct.
