On 2019-03-25 17:38:24 +0000, mark lewis -> Ozz Nixon said:

>
>   ON> PS. What was the answer to the origin of Tear?
>
> tear lines were originally used to indicate the end of the message
> text... they are used like the ones in news and email... everything
> below them could be cut off... back in the day when bbses were run off
> of floppies, systems stripped everything out of the messages they could
> so they could store more messages... eventually, they were just used to
> indicate the end of the message body... of course, also stripping out
> some control data lead to not being able to respond in some ways... for
> example, you could not respond privately via netmail to an echomail
> message...

Very interesting... back in the Floppy era, I was not active in Fidonet. We had
 a small network we devised in Tampa in 1983 to 85 until I started at IBM and
moved to North Florida.

I started on a Xenix 8" Floppy system, then upgraded to my own Tandy Model 1,
with 4 5.25" drives - Boot, BBS, Msgs, Files. The days when we wrote 4kb or
smaller, learned ASM, developed our own task swapping, ahhhh... the good ol'
days, where every sysop knew every sysop, knew which users to watch out for,
and occasionally we all got together as one big social network.

In '92, I moved up to Chattanooga to start my own Business and joined Fidonet
running Xenophobe and ported the "Fido" patch from PUP to my BBS. The ChatTN
sysops met every weekend, got to know everyone, have breakfast, and go about
life for the next 166 hours... Everyone helped everyone setup their First BBS,
or Tweak DOS and Cache Engines to respond faster.

Eventually I switched to FroDo, 1.x as I aquired QuickBBS source and had a
simple startbbs.bat to tie FastEcho, FroDo, and QuickBBS all together. (Never
got into TICs). (17áDecá1993, nodelist.351
was went I switched to PCBoard and drop Fido development for RelayNet (RIME) -
I provided Planet Connect feeds to everyone, but I was given authority to start
 developing and porting UPI and AP broadcasts to Text News streams... March '96
 acquired MotorCity Software from Rod and started an ISP in Chattanooga. Which
consumed all of my online time, evntually closing all the BBS lines and started
 another software company developing Server Socket suites for some of the Big
Boys in California. Which became my main revenue stream until 2012 when I
started mobile development for the Pharmacy industry.

2016, I decided my tools I had been developing since 2000
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ModernPascal

Now using my tools, I was able to whip out a full NNTP RFC 977, 2980 and 3977
compliant server using JAM as the current back-end, all under 80kb - as my
framework works like .Net's CLR... but I focus on NON-Windows platforms.

-- 
.. Ozz Nixon
... Author ExchangeBBS (suite)
.... Since 1983 BBS Developer

--- FMail-W32 2.0.1.4
 * Origin: ExchangeBBS WHQ (1:275/362.0)