Re: Apple IIgs UUCP Inquiry

[rgreene@crchs10.bnr.ca (Robert D. Greene)]

On 23 Nove 1992, Brian Tao wrote: 

|    Funny, I was browsing through our UUCP maps here and I came across this
|very interesting entry:
|
|#N      wizlair
|#S      Apple //gs (Prodos-8); UUCP //gs v2.1a
|#O      Wizard's Lair Private BBS
|#C      Robert D. Greene
|#E      rgreene@bnr.ca
|#T
|#P      9150 Fair Oaks #915, Dallas, Texas 75231
|#L
|#R      Wizlair is the development site for UUCP-//gs.
|#R      Wizlair is moving to Dallas in early 1991. Please use the
|#R      contact address <rgreene@bnr.ca> until that time.
|#U
|#W      rgreene@bnr.ca; Wed Jan 2, 1991
|
|    Check your 'u.usa.tx.5' file for this entry.  I mailed the guy at that
|address, but I don't think it is valid any more.  Anyone down in Dallas
|want to try contacting this guy at his (I assume) home address?  Going by
|the date of the entry, I would think he's been working on it for at most
|two years now...

Ah, found out at last. *smirk* Seriously, I started working on UUCP-//gs way 
back in 1990 as a spare time project. All of my coding was Prodos 8 based
and compiled under Merlin. The idea was to link my then bulletin board system
up with the world email system by UUCP. 

The first draft of the code took about a week and it had a few protocol bugs,
but (if you look at the specs) the UUCP G protocol isn't really that hard to do.
I added some configurability features and did some debugging with some issues
talking to a UUPC system over the next few months, and by late 1990 had a running
system that was talking to 3 sites in Houston (two Unix and one IBM-PC UUPC).

At the time, interest was very low (it's stretching my memory, but it seems like
Proline was the "wave of the future" then and they had a psuedo-UUCP gateway system
of their own that most BBS operators were opting for); however I still was planning
on making a nice user interface and releasing to the public.

In 1991, (the time of this post), I decided to relocate my Houston based bulletin
board system to Dallas; however, it seems like the toll of running 24 hours a day
for several years finally caught up with the //gs. Upon reaching Dallas, I was only
able to get it to boot once, and thereafter rewarded with system errors. *sigh*

So, the long and short is: I do have a UUCP implementation, but I haven't touched
it since late 1990. It's only the protocol stack and has no real user interfaces 
(besides some clunky junk to read/send mail and news just so I could see it work). 
And worst of all, I'd have to resurrect a long dead 5 Mbyte Profile to get at any
of this stuff. :( :( :(

I have made some //gs contacts in Dallas, and bringing my system back from the dead
and finishing out my UUCP code is on my list of things to do (thus my entry still 
being in the UUCP maps), but work keeps me pretty busy these days. The option of compiling
a publicly available UUCP/UUPC version mentioned earlier (assuming that C compilers
for the //gs are now pretty reasonable) is probably the best bet to getting something
that looks nice and works well running in the near future.

- Bob Greene

Bob Greene     LAN/WAN/TEAM Engineering and Support  Bell Northern Research
rgreene@bnr.ca           214/684-7396  ESN 444-7396  Richardson, TX USA