Subj : MMTerm? To : William McBrine From : Jim Hanoian Date : Tue Apr 17 2001 01:56 pm -=> William McBrine wrote to Jim Hanoian <=- JH> Wave and Silver Xpress were developed to fix issues that BBSs JH> in Fido experienced with trying to network using QWK. WM> Erm... Fido is a networking technology unto itself; you WM> wouldn't be _networking_ using QWK _in_ Fido -- QWK would only WM> be an offline reader format there. And neither Blue Wave nor WM> OPX has ever been anything but an offline reader format, AFAIK. OK, I'll buy that... change my last line above to "with trying to do mail using QWK." WM> Re: QWK being a networking technology before it was used in WM> readers, I've often heard this repeated (mainly by you IIRC), WM> but not authoritatively. Do you have a reference for that? I WM> don't think it's true, because the existing QWK networks use WM> kludged extensions to the format, and because this snippet from WM> the 1st Reader docs suggests a reader origin: I was going from my memory of Sparky's "History of QWK" that was on his web site for years. Unfortunately, that site has been taken down, or perhaps the links changed. In any case, I don't have access to the info anymore. From that perspective, perhaps your data is the most reliable since it is actually in writing. Thinking back on it, I might be getting Sparky's story mixed up with Kip Compton's story... can anybody confirm that? JH> inherit many limitations. Quite a few QWK implementations still JH> require header information in ALL CAPS. That riles a lot of JH> folks, including those whose names get mangled (like McB...) WM> I thought it was just me. :-) Anyway, this isn't inherent in WM> QWK; it's just a question of stupid implementors. But back in WM> the early days of QWK, a lot of BBSes were uppercase-only. JH> Some QWK implementations require messages to be less than 100 JH> lines long. WM> Again -- stupid, but not actually part of the format. In such WM> cases, we can only blame the authors of the specific WM> implementations. The QWK format per se has no such limit. WM> You're actually agreeing with Ben here. :-) Well, since QWK duplicated the messagebase format of PCBoard, and the standard was not officially documented, many people intepreted it as adhering to PCBoard standards. This was, I believe, the initial root of the all caps header. Also, PCBoard messages had a size limit of 64k (I think it was) which was later "updated" to permit messages of a liberal 100 lines. JH> Further, QWK is limited in all header fields to 25 characters, WM> This, by contrast, is a real limit of the format, and a serious WM> flaw. Amen! WM> I don't think we can really say that SX is primary on Wildcat, WM> when the OPX door for WINS is incomplete and defective. (I WM> dunno about older versions of Wildcat.) QWK, on the other hand, WM> had an important place in Wildcat's history -- the QWK WM> interface, originally a standalone third-party door known as WM> TomCat, was one of the best ever. And QWK networking made great WM> inroads on Wildcat long before Fido did. I remember TomCat, and WildCat still uses the "T" command to get into mail, doesn't it? JH> SX products are most consistent because the doors and the readers are JH> all owned/produced by Hector. WM> Oddly enough, despite what should be his unifying control, I WM> don't find them consistent at all. This could be due to his WM> multiple personality disorder. I might be more kind and attribute it (at least partially) to the base BBS type that each door model had to work with. Much more consistent that the ways that different QWK doors worked with different BBS types, right? JH> The QWK standard was not a standard until Sparky released 1stReader JH> version 2.0 on July 20th, 1995. That's something like SEVEN YEARS JH> from when QWK started. In the interim, everybody else relied on JH> reverse engineered information, some better than others, and some JH> programmers implementing the standard better than others. WM> The reverse-engineered information is better than the WM> "official" spec anyway. Sad but true. I agree. That's why I've always listed BOTH the "traditional" and the "official" versions of the spec on my pages. .... Jim Hanoian, Augusta, Maine, USA .... Yogi Bare was a Buddhist Nudist. --- MultiMail/Win32 v0.40 * Origin: COMM Port OS/2 juge.com 204.89.247.1 (281) 980-9671 (1:106/2000) .