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[About The Guide]
Firstly, let me say that RemoteAccess was very much a team
effort. I had been running my bulletin board for about a
year, it was getting pretty busy so I put on a second line.
The software I was using was QuickBBS, so I did a heap of
work trying to get it running both lines. For the most part
it worked, but it was very clumsy. I was complaining to Bob
Fletcher, a sysop in Victoria, about it one night, and Bob
said something like "Well, YOU could always have a go at
something better!" So the basic concept was born. An "all-
singing, all-dancing" BBS package that would run multiple
lines and occupy as little memory as possible. "Piece of
cake!" I thought. In my spare time I started playing around
with a couple of file-displaying utilities written in Turbo
Pascal 5 (which I had just bought, and was anxious to
learn.)
Enter Phil. Someone mentioned that "some bloke called Phil
Mackay" was writing a toolbox of routines to manipulate the
QuickBBS message and user database files so I dropped him a
message. Phil was immediately taken by the idea and sent me
the source to what he had written. I was impressed. As it
happened, Bob was in Perth at this time and during a couple
of brainstorming sessions helped to refine what I already
had (which wasn't much).
Gradually I started to spend more and more of my spare time
working on it, and I started to realise the scale of the
project (which still kinda frightens me). I realised there
was no way I could do it all myself, so I enlisted the help
of one or two other people to write utilities, and "farmed
out" a fair bit of coding to Phil. All the following people
deserve recognition for their contributions:
Phil Mackay - all the high and low-level message database
routines, the menu editor and an infinite number of
suggestions, not to mention invaluable advice on many
occasions.
David Nugent - Wrote the message-base maintenance utility
"RAMSG", was ALWAYS ready to provide answers to any low-
level communications problem, and wrote the multitasker-
aware code.
Adam Blake - Did the configuration utility "RACONFIG" and
changed it twice a day when I made more mods to the main
program, uncomplainingly. (Well, almost).
The beta test team - thanks guys! Couldn't have done it
without ya. Too numerous to list here, all the current beta
systems are listed in the accompanying document RA-
BETAS.DOC.
Andrew Milner.
Perth, Western Australia.
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