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From: thaler@speedy.cs.wisc.edu (Maurice Thaler)
Newsgroups: alt.bbs,comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: BBS Software
Message-ID: <6569@spool.cs.wisc.edu>
Date: 1 Nov 88 16:18:27 GMT
References: <956@galaxy> <5802@hoptoad.uucp>
Sender: news@spool.cs.wisc.edu
Reply-To: thaler@speedy.cs.wisc.edu (Maurice Thaler)
Distribution: usa
Organization: U of Wisconsin CS Dept
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Fido has a MUCH more difficult user interface from PC-Board. SYSOP
utilities are not as nice, file storage (1 FILE PER MESSAGE!) is 
awful. 
I don't love PC_Board, but fido is not a great alternative. 
The one thing you can say about Fido is that it was the first to have
FIDO-NET mail network and the first to support batch files. 
PC-Board does some pretty brain-damaged things too, but you can
move around quickly in it, and it is extremely easy to set up becasue
of the  large collection of utilities written to run with it. The best
example of this is PRO-DOOR. It lets you do FULL SCREEN editing,
batch download/upload with a multitude of protocols, and is reasonable
easy to use with multiple command parsing( for example, you can
download a batch of files and logoff in one command, which still
exits with a routine that gives you 10 seconds to change your mind
after the download.  
A command for this would be
d z file1.typ file2.typ file3.typ g  
download, zmodem, files (with ARC the file type is optional) goodbye.
In the menu driven world of PC BBS's this is really nice. Fido does this
too to a point, but the user interface is so lame that it really is 
un-appealing.  Opus is another fido system in desguise (not much of
one). The fact is that there is a great need for a new bbs system
to be written that has the right features without making the user
inteface so heavily menu driven that it is oppresive.  The PC-Board
system in the meantime is a bland,usable shell that add-on's like 
PRO-DOOR make into a reasonable alternative. 
There are some things about the authors of PC-Board that really make me
wonder though. I called up Salt Air BBS to ask them why their YMODEM-G
did not work with my copy of ZCOMM. They replied that ZCOMM did not
support YMODEM-G. Pretty curious since Chuck Forsberg (author of ZCOMM)
basically INVENTED YMODEM-G! When I confronted them on that and asked
them to RENAME their MUTANT PROTOCOL to XMODEM-1K-G (more apt since it
does not support filename ,date, time,size passing as listed in the
YMODEM spec) they deleted my messages and acted like I was being
offensive. It is appalling to me that pioneers like Chuck Forsberg go
the full mile writing and FULLY DOCUMENTING protocols in files like
YZMODEM.DOC (recently updated and available on Simtel20) and yet
John Friel mangles the protocol in QMODEM and THAT MANGLED MUTATED
protocol becomes the standard that PROCOMM, PC-BOARD and a host of
others use as a standard. There are some notable exceptions to this
carelessness in TELIX, and PIBTERM. 
Sorry about the outro flame ....