NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #18/NN_1992_18.iso/spool/comp/sys/amiga/misc/12840

Internet Message Format | 1992-08-19 | 7.1 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!ukma!wupost!waikato.ac.nz!comp.vuw.ac.nz!amigans!durie!liam
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.comm,comp.sys.amiga.misc
Subject: Re:  Citadel authors
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
From: [e-mail] (Liam Greenwood)
Date: 19 Aug 92 22:01:50 GMT+12
References: <[e-mail]> <crystal.714018267@glia> <[e-mail]>
Distribution: world
Organization: It's Home, really...
Lines: 145

  From the UNIDEL (Unix Citadel) Docs...

HISTORY.DOC

                            Citadel
                       Bulletin Board System

Citadel was written in mid-December 1981 by CrT. Miraculously, it
ran three days unattended over New Year's, collecting some
remarkably favorable reactions. During the months that it ran at
633-3282 (ODD-DATA), Citadel became one of the more popular BBs in
town, and there was some disappointment when a hardware failure
forced the system down in February of 1982.  But in January CrT had
published the  source code in BDS C, putting it in the public domain.

David Mitchell brought up the next incarnation of the Citadel
program in April of 1982, running on hardware provided by Richard
Knox.  Called the Island Communication System, it is located on
Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound.  ICS has about 30 regular users
and about 120 log entries. Newcomers find it easy to learn, and
often leave messages praising it. Some of the system's daily users
are in Boston.

Citadel is descended from DandD.pas, an adventure game editor/driver.
It is arranged as a series of rooms, starting with the LOBBY.  In
each room the user can read existing messages and leave more. There
may be up to 128 rooms in the current implementation. The system was
brought up with only one room, the LOBBY.  Additional rooms were
created by the users, with room names appropriate to the topics covered.

This is being written (82Dec07) as the Version 2 beta-test goes out.
Version 1 got a friendly reception and had relatively few bugs.  We'll
see if this is a trend or fluctuation...

Environment:  Citadel has had a checkered past.  It first ran on a
64K Heath H89 with Magnolia CP/M, Hayes Smartmodem (plus an acoustic
on another port) and BDS C V1.32. Further development was done under
BDS C 1.4x on a TRS-80 with Omikron CP/M, a Teletek FDC-1, and a
Furgeson Big Board.  At present the ICS implementation runs on the
FDC-1, while development is done on the Big Board. Version 2 was
tested on the original H89, now with dual 8" SSDD drives :-) and a
printer, Magnolia CP/M V2.223 :-( , and BDS C 1.46.

Starting with the 82Jan posting on Seattle's MailBoard (thanks John!),
various fragments of Version 1 seem to have percolated around the
country. This version 2 release should supercede them and save
people the frustration of trying to make sense out of them.

David Mitchell
CrT

85Apr27
   Having obtained Citadel 2.10 from CUG through SuperComp, and then
having helped upgrade it to Citadel 2.40 using, at various times, a
H89 and a Z-100, Citadel-86 for MS-DOS 2.xx was developed in order
to ... um.  Well, in any case, the first version of Citadel-86 went
up on the 8088 side of a Z-100 in the Fall of '84, using MS-DOS 2.13.

   As the months passed and as the whims hit the translator, Citadel-86
came closer and closer to being functionally identical to Citadel 2.40,
and in January '85 the final downloading stuff was added, thus
coming close 'nuff to Citadel 2.40's main programs for the translator.
During March and April of '85, the utilities of Citadel 2.40
underwent translation and by mid-April, the last of these utilities
had been translated and at least superficially tested, thus
completing the Citadel translation process (thank ghod).

   Now all that remains is isolating and killing the final few bugs,
some of which the translator is certain are resident in the compiler
in use (otherwise he'd have to admit to having made mistakes, lord
forbid!).

   Oh, and by the way, the name Citadel-86 was the suggestion of a
certain Lord Castleregh, and was selected after a polling process of
the first Citadel-86 system (Test System).
                                                Hue, Jr.

85Jun13
   Ha Ha Ha. Here we are, thinking we only have a few more bugs to
hit? Silly me, I decided to add in the auto-networking stuff on a
whim. WHAT have I created? Whom knows ...

                                                Hue, Jr.

87Sep09
    And now it's been ported to the Atari ST.  My porting job wasn't
even difficult -- it took me just over a month to get it running on
the Atari ST.  STadel has become a very popular program in the last
6 months, with about 40 sites around the country (and outside! I've
heard reports that there is a STadel in Italy!, of all places.)

    STadel is slowly diverging from C-86, since I've decided to
try to reverse-engineer modifications that Hue, Jr. has put into
C-86 rather than just repeat ports of his code. That's introduced
a few, um, interesting bugs and variant behaviors....

    Quite a few people have helped with STadel.  Dale Schumacher
(Dalnefre') wrote/ported a UUCP packet-driver which I used as a
kernel for my UUCP mail gateway, Jay Johnson has provided quite
a bit of useful advice and code fragments from his implementation
of Citadel for the Amiga, and Hue, Jr. continues to diddle C-86,
providing me with a endless source of headaches..., umm, er,
inspiration.
                                                orc

24 Apr 88
    And now Unidel has been written from the ground up to run under
UNIX* and in front of UseNet News.  It's been five months since the
first time I saw STadel.  I spent three months continuing to diddle
with a BBS for UNIX and News when it hit me that Citadel was what I
really wanted.  Today it's up and running.

    Unidel is a major diversion from STadel and Citadel.  To the
person using Unidel it is identical to STadel, to the sysadmin it
is a news reader similar to 'vnews'.  The files and organization
are those 'normal' to UNIX, users are in the passwd file and have
home directories, the message base is UseNet News, the networker
is News and UUCP, mail is handled by the system mailer, and all
configuration and user files are editable text files.

                                Ken

P.S.  About this time orc is also doing a direct port of STadel
to UNIX.  Those looking for a self-contained system or a system
that evolves with the other ports of STadel would do well to
take a look at it.

19 Dec 90
    After a few system crashes, systems sold, four versions of UNIX
and months without access to a computer, Unidel is now on it's way out
into the world.  Unidel now networks with STadels and (marginally)
Cit-86s using citnet, has more robust and UseNet-compatible handling
of mail and news headers, is relatively clean coded, supports multiple
private mail rooms and uses external editors and file transfer
programs.

                                Ken
                                [e-mail]

*UNIX is a trademark of AT&T
--
 Liam Greenwood ------ [e-mail] ------ Wanganui, N.Z.
                Don't tell my Mother I'm a programmer,
              she thinks I'm a piano player in a brothel