..and I still wish I had asked, because I would have done just that-
made it available. As it's not been. Ah well. Shoulda, woulda,
coulda.
Can't change the past.
Not sure what you mean by METAL being "is not so anyone can use that
program", though you probably meant so that anyone can use what was
started with MACOS without having to own the ACOS version of GBBS.
Funny thing is I never could understand the whole mess that MACOS
caused as MACOS is in effect no different than any other GBBS/ACOS
'mod', in that it requires the ACOS to be present.
ACOS had no 'copy protection', the number of MACOS users was probably
squat compared to the number of, dare I say it, pirated ACOS users
over all. Other than that MACOS spread like wildfire among both legit
and non-legit users, I don't think all that many simply started using
MACOS that were not already using ACOS.
So why LTW had a conniption over it.. thats like saying that Exfer or
Land of Spur, which were pretty high profile 'mods' were also worth
having fits over- due to the attention they drew toward GBBS. I
realize that MACOS was replacement kernel where was the others were
code, but there were also ACOS mods to the binary, too.
Point is- LLUCE was vaporware of the century, ACOS lived on, and that
was that.
I had a ton of fun doing MACOS stuff. Things that just were not
possible under ACOS. The larger text editor space, the improved PTSE,
things like the Turbo Run game (Night Driver clone) were not possible
in ACOS, but in MACOS it was. The Space Invaders clone that was done
on ACOS was much better on MACOS. It was faster, way faster. Due to
the variable handling and memory space that was not present on ACOS.
Yet if you associate MACOS and ACOS - it's very much like today's
views on Jailbreak vs. not Jailbreak to the iPhone/touch, as in
Jailbreak automatically seems to label you in some folks eyes.
Looking back, too- I seem to recall several high profile, well placed
BBS's using MACOS and even continuing to use well afterwards.