Subj : Re: can someone help ple
To   : Jimmy Day
From : William McBrine
Date : Mon Sep 30 2002 04:55 pm

-=> Jimmy Day wrote to Rob Strover <=-

 JD> however, the BW packet is different because BW has additional
 JD> features;

Not ONLY because of that. QWK and BW do similar things, but are laid out
completely differently. Most of the differences are arbitrary, not
functional.

 JD> so maybe the BW packets don't use the control.dat file?

No, they don't. Nor anything else that's in a typical QWK packet. The two
formats share nothing except general concepts. (Blue Wave packets, for
example, have files that are roughly the _equivalent_ of CONTROL.DAT in
QWK, but they're done in a completely different way.)

Incidentally, there are also several other offline packet formats, as
different from BW and QWK as they are from each other; but QWK and BW are
the most common.

 JD> Guess that was the *wrong* thing to say here!  but brings up the
 JD> logical question - did Microsoft ever produce an OLR for Blue Wave or
 JD> QWK?

Are you kidding? No way. This stuff is miles below their radar. Hell, they
were years late in producing even _Internet_ software.

 JD>  And what does QWK stand for, anyway?

"Quick". As in, "this is a quick way to get your messages." (That is, quick
in terms of the amount of time spent connected to the BBS, vs. reading
online.) It's not actually an acronym.

Also, the first QWK reader was written in QuickBASIC, IIRC. I don't know if
that contributed to the name or not.

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