Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!wuarchive!udel!princeton!phoenix!kadickey
From: kadickey@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Kent Andrew Dickey)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: Cat-Fur
Message-ID: <14352@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 8 Mar 90 05:48:29 GMT
References: <1279@carroll1.cc.edu> <3715@plains.UUCP> <1990Mar8.001003.3022@spectre.ccsf.caltech.edu>
Reply-To: kadickey@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Kent Andrew Dickey)
Organization: Princeton University, NJ
Lines: 67

In article <1990Mar8.001003.3022@spectre.ccsf.caltech.edu> toddpw@tybalt.caltech.edu (Todd P. Whitesel) writes:
>wilken@plains.UUCP (Scott Wilken) writes:
>
>[ to someone asking for Cat-Fur source so that it could be adapted to external
>	modems ]
>
>[ something about Cat Fur being useless for common file transfer ]
>
>That I disagree with. Not only was Cat Fur cool in that you could transfer at
>1200 baud without the 212 option, you could also keep up a two way 'talk' style
>chat during the transfer! My friends and I used this a lot, We'd be downloading
>stuff and the Sysop of the BBS would start chatting through the Cat-Fur, as
>those were the days where a typical DDD'd game disk would still take 20 minutes
>at 1200 baud.
>
>If anyone has source for Cat-Fur, do post it, or at least Email it to me too.
>I've always wanted some good programming examples for the thing, as well as
>a look at how the program was organized because Cat-Fur struck me as one of the
>most efficient comm programs I have ever seen.
>
>Todd Whitesel
>toddpw @ tybalt.caltech.edu

Efficient?  Maybe...but it's error detection was abysmal (If you had a
noisy connection, the transfer would always be bad...), and it had a few
internal bugs that would cause it to crash into the monitor.  This
crashing was a serious problem for sysops who used it as their transfer
section of their BBS--users could go to Cat-Fur, make it crash, and then
start modifying the BBS system.  Kinda annoying.  I once patched out
most of the bugs I could find (they all had to do with stack overflow
and Applesoft conflicts), but I can't remember where they all were now.

On a historical note, the other major transfer program of that time was
Ascii Express, which also had its fair share of bugs that could cause it
to crash (I never could track some of those down...).  But it was a much
more professional piece of programming....

I liked the chat feature too...but the problems with transfers seemed to
outweigh that advantage (unless all you had was the 300 baud apple-cat).

About 2 years ago, some friends were writing the end-all telecomm
program, but I guess nothing came of it...(one of them was Rob, aka The
Guy Who Wrote Alien Mind).

With today's high-speed transfers, the chat feature no longer seems as
important....

I have seen the Cat-Fur source floating around, but I don't know where
you might be able to find it...I think modifying Cat-Fur is definitely
*NOT* the way to go--it's structure is very rigid, and adding features,
especially for different modems, would be difficult (Cat-Fur is written
for the AppleCat, and uses many AppleCat idiosyncracies to its
advantage.  Simulating these tricks for other modems is definitely not
worth the effort).

Your best bet is to modify, say, the XMODEM protocol so that some of the
packets would be specially marked "Chat", and would be displayed on the
other user's screen, rather than treated as part of the transfer.
Cat-Fur basically achieved this by sending a "Chat" packet after the
transfer-packet, which the other side would realize was to be displayed
to the screen.

Modifying the Cat-Fur source to use other modems would be much harder
than rewriting the whole thing from scratch.

			Kent
kadickey@phoenix.Princeton.EDU