question

[alz (Al Zerm)]

     I must say that I am impressed with both your manual for Proline and for
Modemworks. The proline manual in particular is an admirable piece of
material. I cannot recall ever hearing another creator of apple host software
saying "there is more to running a successful message system than just good
software; the members on your system ultimately determine its value." This
knowledge does not yet seem to be in widespread practice, even today. It
shows a considerable amount of wisdom to have discussed it in your software
documentation.
     With this conversion, I am concluding three years of running GBBS pro.
I am welcoming a return to applesoft, ampersands, and prodos pathnames,
because I am thoroughly exhausted. I am tired of ACOS compilers and p-code
interpreters. I am tired of runtime systems with editors that will hang, with
memory management routines that overwrite the system time data from the clock
card, with string handling that freaks when you do too much of it at once,
with file i/o routines that still hang now and then at arbitrary points, with
binary message files and message i/o that even now is losing pieces of my
email with increasing frequency, and with a file i/o buffer that is only 128
bytes long. Both of the security breaches we've had in these 3 years have
been due to bugs which were in the acos.obj runtime system.
     Thank you for reading this far, and for relieving me from clever designs
trapped in bad implementations.
 
-Al

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