-=> Rick Christian wrote to Tony Langdon <=-

 RC> FD had a nice setup screen, status screen, and there was more it to a
 RC> the time,
 RC>  which I don't recall all the details. Alot of it had to do with actual
 RC> operation of the queue(s) etc, but that is a rough recolection at best.

Bink was more text driven.  I did pretty up its status screen with some
olours.

 TL> especially in the earlier days, when I was running 2400 bps.  Was
 TL> interesting seeing bot RxD and Txd lights on continuously. 

 RC> Well I had what Bell of PA at that time called Metro Service, basically
 RC> I could
 RC>  call most of the 412 area code prior to the NPA split, for
 RC> $35-40/month. Slurp
 RC>  as much as I needed.

My transfers were local, but they were fairly large for the day, so the
bidirectional protocol was a huge time saver.  I'v be like "Cool, this system
runs Bink, or "Damn, it's FD, slower transfers! 

 TL> I was a big fan of GIGO at the time. 

 RC> I got hooked into the beta testing of it early on, and it was like FD
 RC> it worked
 RC>  better than what was the big work horse of this at the time, I think
 RC> UFGATE??
 RC>  GIGO was just awesome. I had to be doing this on something for awhile
 RC> before GIGO came along..hmmm.. I had a uucp account with Telerama for a
 RC> long time. Matter of fact I think I was like one of the last few they
 RC> were allowing to keep the damn things! I 'd love to see the code of
 RC> this revived for Linux.  It won't be me as a I don't touch C.

I loved GIGO, it did almost everything, but not quite.  It wasn't built to gate
netmail from multiple zones, but a handy utility called NetMgr did some fancy
rewriting, creating  virtual addresses in each othernet for my gateway.  It
won't be me that works on GIGO either, I also stay away from C, never really
learned it. 

 TL> Yeah, all are dead, as are the [amateur|Part 97] packet radio to
 TL> FTN
 TL> gating
 TL> systems
 TL> that were around in the 90s. 

 RC> Really??  None of those survived? Hmm I would have thought some of that
 RC> stuff in the packet world of Amateur radio would continue on. I never
 RC> got into that as at that time you still needed 5WPM CW, and my brain
 RC> just didn't then and doesn't know work for CW. I moved on to build much
 RC> bigger radios sytems in numerous states.

Packet survived, but not the gateways to Fidonet.

 RC> I'd love to see a phoneix of Gigo on Linux, and I'd test it out, I
 RC> think Fido, FTN/UseNet/Email gating is till a useful thing. Even if the
 RC> little whippersnappers don't see the big pixture!

I would love to see GIGO come back too.  Linux would be my platform of choice
as well, since that's what I base my servers on.  Syncronet has some cool
capabilities, but it doesn't seem to be able to gate email like GIGO could.

 RC> My lab notes for testing have things like FD, BGFAX under DOSBox on the
 RC> list, I
 RC>  just have so many things going on right now the list never seems to
 RC> shrink!

Sounds like all of my todo lists. 


... Mashed potatoes with skim milk is like a sports car with an automatic.
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