billk brianm daveu davidv evanh joed johnd jonl keithr kevinw louisi michaelb natei steph ucscc!sun!argv ucscc!ucscb!clp ucscc!ucscb!garlick Time for a trip down memory lane... :-) Evan Hunt and I started talking about the evolution of source code for forums on UCSCB earlier the other evening. We got quite a bit of information about who wrote what and who influenced whom, but I'd like to check with you old timers :) to get corrections, additions, etc. Pretentious title follows: MODERN DAY GUTENBERGS: AUTHORS OF MULTI-USER FORUMS AT UCSC The earliest author of forum code we know of was Nate Ingersoll. The only information we have of his early forum is that it influenced later work. Dan Heller seems to have worked on forums too, but we are unclear as to how much his products were actually used. Brian Moffett was influenced by Nate's and Dan's work to write "dforum" (d for dorimay). It is unclear if this was a hack on previous code, or original code inspired by existing forums. Jim Kinoshita built on to dforum, but that version didn't go very far. Evan Hunt built on Jim's work, but he didn't do much more. In 1985 Keith Reynolds acquired Nate's source. He used this and also was influenced by dforum, to create "sforum" (s for shonnon). This was very popular and many forums used this source. About this time, Chuck Peterson wrote the multi-node "tforum" (t for tree-structured), presumably from scratch. This code was fixed, modified, and updated for years, but "/usr/games/tforum" remained as a staple of UCSCB users. Jon Luini and Evan Hunt both wrote remote tforum clients. A new version of Chuck's work is in place even now, as /usr/public/forum. It's less buggy and more popular than ever. In 1986, Jon Luini became interested in writing forums. He acquired sforum, and wrote "SHADES", which evolved into the multi-node forum, "romp". A rewrite was called "uromp", then the single-node "gazebo", and finally another multi-node version of gazebo called "gromp". Gazebo and gromp survive today on UCSCB. They are full of useful and fun features, but this makes them slow programs to use. Nate Ingersoll wrote Q+A, a networked graphical forum, about this time. Though it was the first UCSC forum to have been designed as a distributed forum, it had an unfamiliar interface, authentication problems, and mostly technical subject matter, so it didn't become very popular, and eventually fell into disrepair. In 1987, Bill Karwin acquired sforum, fixed some bugs and added some features to create "cforum" (c is for C). This source is still used by several privately-owned forums on UCSCB, including the mainstay of private forums, Romance Forum. Fewer features, but faster than gazebo. Bill has also written forums in csh and sh, and made an attempt at implementing a forum using only sed. I used UCSCB back in 1979, when it apparently still ran System V. There was "/usr/games/gsh forum", written and managed by persons unknown to me, and there were also at least two private forums, but I didn't know how to use directories and pathnames very well, so I didn't become familiar with these. I recall that none of the forums were tree-structured. At some point, the forum in /usr/games became known as "Overforum", as a pun on the underground, privately owned "Underforum". Can any of you guys add to or correct this information? What was the forum technology before 1984? What was the policy of CATS toward forums over the years? If you know the current email address of anyone else who worked on (i.e. not just used) unix b forums between the late 70's and early 80's, and would be interested in contributing to the scholarly study of local history, :-) please let me know, and I'll mail them too. Just a collector of trivia, -Bill  From billk Mon Jan 28 18:49:03 1991 From: billk@sco.COM (William K. Karwin) Date: Mon, 28 Jan 1991 18:48:58 PST Secret-Identity: The Easter Bunny X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.1.1 5/02/90) To: billk, brianm, daveu, davidv, evanh, joed, johnd, jonl, keithr, kevinw, louisi, michaelb, natei, steph, ucscc!sun!argv, ucscc!ucscb!clp, ucscc!ucscb!garlick Subject: History of UCSCB Forums Message-ID: <9101281849.aa21762@fiasco.sco.COM> Status: OR Time for a trip down memory lane... :-) Evan Hunt and I started talking about the evolution of source code for forums on UCSCB earlier the other evening. We got quite a bit of information about who wrote what and who influenced whom, but I'd like to check with you old timers :) to get corrections, additions, etc. Pretentious title follows: MODERN DAY GUTENBERGS: AUTHORS OF MULTI-USER FORUMS AT UCSC The earliest author of forum code we know of was Nate Ingersoll. The only information we have of his early forum is that it influenced later work. Dan Heller seems to have worked on forums too, but we are unclear as to how much his products were actually used. Brian Moffett was influenced by Nate's and Dan's work to write "dforum" (d for dorimay). It is unclear if this was a hack on previous code, or original code inspired by existing forums. Jim Kinoshita built on to dforum, but that version didn't go very far. Evan Hunt built on Jim's work, but he didn't do much more. In 1985 Keith Reynolds acquired Nate's source. He used this and also was influenced by dforum, to create "sforum" (s for shonnon). This was very popular and many forums used this source. About this time, Chuck Peterson wrote the multi-node "tforum" (t for tree-structured), presumably from scratch. This code was fixed, modified, and updated for years, but "/usr/games/tforum" remained as a staple of UCSCB users. Jon Luini and Evan Hunt both wrote remote tforum clients. A new version of Chuck's work is in place even now, as /usr/public/forum. It's less buggy and more popular than ever. In 1986, Jon Luini became interested in writing forums. He acquired sforum, and wrote "SHADES", which evolved into the multi-node forum, "romp". A rewrite was called "uromp", then the single-node "gazebo", and finally another multi-node version of gazebo called "gromp". Gazebo and gromp survive today on UCSCB. They are full of useful and fun features, but this makes them slow programs to use. Nate Ingersoll wrote Q+A, a networked graphical forum, about this time. Though it was the first UCSC forum to have been designed as a distributed forum, it had an unfamiliar interface, authentication problems, and mostly technical subject matter, so it didn't become very popular, and eventually fell into disrepair. In 1987, Bill Karwin acquired sforum, fixed some bugs and added some features to create "cforum" (c is for C). This source is still used by several privately-owned forums on UCSCB, including the mainstay of private forums, Romance Forum. Fewer features, but faster than gazebo. Bill has also written forums in csh and sh, and made an attempt at implementing a forum using only sed. I used UCSCB back in 1979, when it apparently still ran System V. There was "/usr/games/gsh forum", written and managed by persons unknown to me, and there were also at least two private forums, but I didn't know how to use directories and pathnames very well, so I didn't become familiar with these. I recall that none of the forums were tree-structured. At some point, the forum in /usr/games became known as "Overforum", as a pun on the underground, privately owned "Underforum". Can any of you guys add to or correct this information? What was the forum technology before 1984? What was the policy of CATS toward forums over the years? What forum sources became most popular? If you know the current email address of anyone else who worked on (i.e. not just used) unix b forums between the late 70's and early 80's, and would be interested in contributing to the scholarly study of local history, :-) please let me know, and I'll mail them too. Just a collector of trivia, -Bill   From kevinw Tue Jan 29 09:39:06 1991 Received: from scovert.sco.com by fiasco.sco.COM id aa29154; Tue, 29 Jan 91 9:39:05 PST From: kevinw@sco.COM (Kevin Wang) X-Mailer: SCO System V Mail (version 3.2) To: billk Subject: Re: History of UCSCB Forums Date: Tue, 29 Jan 91 9:39:38 PST Message-ID: <9101290939.aa01591@scovert.sco.COM> Status: ORr That should be "Ovr" and "Undr" forums, I believe... No 'e'. You might include some of the sillier fora, like boasting, garbage (keithr's) and...something else that just slipped my mind. Also, there's grimjack forum (bleah) and dennie's msgs/pmsgs, which are almost forum-like. You might include information about various functionalities, like circular fora, the ability of a user to create their own nodes in a multi-node forum (and where it put the du for it..) Might also be interesting to comment on tforum's sudden existence during the Schlenger forum crackdown. What kind of source did CatHouse use? I remember it had a different feel to it than some of the other fora. It had a working mail function, I think, before some of the others. -K   From natei Tue Jan 29 11:20:02 1991 Received: from moscow.sco.com by fiasco.sco.COM id aa00482; Tue, 29 Jan 91 11:20:01 PST From: natei@sco.COM (Nathaniel Ingersoll) X-Mailer: SCO System V Mail (version 3.2) To: billk brianm daveu davidv evanh joed johnd jonl keithr kevinw louisi michaelb steph ucscc!sun!argv ucscc!ucscb!clp ucscc!ucscb!garlick Subject: Re: History of UCSCB Forums Date: Tue, 29 Jan 91 11:17:58 PST Message-ID: <9101291118.aa12954@moscow.sco.COM> Status: OR : : From billk Mon Jan 28 18:48:18 1991 [...] : MODERN DAY GUTENBERGS: : AUTHORS OF MULTI-USER FORUMS AT UCSC : : The earliest author of forum code we know of was Nate Ingersoll. The only I don't know any names, but Fantasy Forum [daveu] and /usr/games/forum were definitely around before I started hacking. By the way, please s/Nate/Nathaniel thanks. : Dan Heller seems to have worked on forums too, but we are unclear as to : how much his products were actually used. I remember him mainly taking nroff/troff source and turning it into "qroff", and turning Mail into mush. : Brian Moffett was influenced by Nate's and Dan's work to write "dforum" : (d for dorimay). It is unclear if this was a hack on previous code, or : original code inspired by existing forums. Probably original, I believe it predated my own efforts. : Nate Ingersoll wrote Q+A, a networked graphical forum, about this time. : Though it was the first UCSC forum to have been designed as a distributed : forum, it had an unfamiliar interface, authentication problems, and : mostly technical subject matter, so it didn't become very popular, and : eventually fell into disrepair. I decided not to have general topics, which probably was a bad idea at least from the usage standpoint. However, my main concern at the time was dissemination of technical Q&A, since everyone was always interrupting me in person, so I didn't really care if it wasn't used for talk and rumor forums. : I used UCSCB back in 1979, when it apparently still ran System V. There probably UNIX V7, not system V. : Just a collector of trivia, : -Bill N   From brianm Tue Jan 29 11:37:40 1991 Received: from scoville.sco.com by fiasco.sco.COM id aa00668; Tue, 29 Jan 91 11:37:38 PST From: brianm@sco.COM (Brian Moffet) Date: Tue, 29 Jan 1991 11:36:34 PST X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.1.2 7/11/90) To: billk (William K. Karwin), daveu, davidv, evanh, joed, johnd, jonl, keithr, kevinw, louisi, michaelb, natei, steph, sun!argv, ucscc!ucscb!clp, ucscc!ucscb!garlick Subject: Re: History of UCSCB Forums Message-ID: <9101291136.aa03587@scoville.sco.COM> Status: OR > > Brian Moffett was influenced by Nate's and Dan's work to write "dforum" > (d for dorimay). It is unclear if this was a hack on previous code, or > original code inspired by existing forums. I was originally influenced by the forum source going around, and was going to modify it. However, I deleted the source, and so I wrote my forum (dforum?) from scratch. I can't remember the name, it was just the thing to do. :-) A fun feature regarding security was to encode the path for the data files in a cute quote, I had mine encoded in a song (American Pie I believe?) so that a core dump wouldn't show where the file were. After that, I determined that a much better method was what I called a circular forum, a message was divided into section or blocks, and you allowed only a certain number to exist in a data-base. I worked on this for a while, and when I got it finished, it became "hacking forum", where people could discuss various techno-babble. This is also where the "Fire Denny because he is incompetant" started up. I believe this forum influenced the tree-forum a bit, and was definately around for a while. Its major characteristic was a single data file, and almost no maintenance. brianm   From daveu Tue Jan 29 13:39:16 1991 Received: from scoville.sco.com by fiasco.sco.COM id aa01759; Tue, 29 Jan 91 13:39:16 PST From: daveu@sco.COM (Dave Uebele) X-Mailer: SCO System V Mail (version 3.2) To: billk brianm davidv evanh joed johnd jonl keithr kevinw louisi michaelb natei steph ucscc!sun!argv ucscc!ucscb!clp ucscc!ucscb!garlick Subject: Re: History of UCSCB Forums Date: Tue, 29 Jan 91 13:38:53 PST Message-ID: <9101291338.aa04987@scoville.sco.COM> Status: OR Just a couple of bits and pieces that I remember or sort of remember. I think I got forum source from either account vandy (Andy Valencia I think) or Steve All. I think vandy was games manager at the time and I believe steve all (not sure of account name) set up the underround gameshell. This was in response to a hard limit of 15 users or less to be allowed into "above ground" gameshell. I may have this backward, account vandy may have been the one running the underground gameshell. Account noman (Scott N.) might remember more about this time period. People being people, the "underforum" become the "in" forum to read. I think Fantasy Forum was one of the first speciality forums in existance. Another "hacker" at this time was Brian Tickler II. He started "tforum". Then it seemed like everyone had a speciality forum program. I don't remember exact order of private forums starting. Anyway, at some point I started using the rewrite of the forum program provided by Brian Moffet. I was not really much of a C programmer at this point. I mostly took existing code and just changed printfs, things like that. I think it was Brian Moffet that added the hooks to record actual login name along with forum message. The original forum program had no provisions for recording uid/login. I did write/adapt a simple exec program that was used to hide the location of the actual forum binaries and related files. This program also had code to selectively lock out certain users. The program was designed to not leave a "clean" core image that might include filename information. Using "strings" on the core file usually produced poems or things along those lines. Later on, setgid programs were used to provide security to forum files. When I first started using ucscb, it was still possible to use setuid programs, but due to various problems with trojan horse programs, this call was disabled. But thats another story.... About Operating systems, ucscb was a PDP 11/70 running V7. Sometime Around 86, Steph Marr convinced the computer center to get a copy of the 2.9 tape from the computer center at Davis and Jim Haynes got ucscb up and running as a 2.9 machine. This allowed people to start experimenting with sockets and TCP/IP on the PDP. I think the summer of 86, they switched to a new hardware platform. Thus 2.9 was only around for about 3 months. I know they had real problems with disk space about this time because all the binaries took up more space and there were more users and what seemed like a lot of space suddenly was not nearly enough. This is what really killed the private forums. UCSC had two PDP's, "a", and "b", the "a" machine was faculty only. The other machines "c" through whatever were mostly VAX'es. When I started I think they only had 2 Vax, and by the time I left they had about 10 and getting other 6800 based computers. dave   From natei Tue Jan 29 13:43:08 1991 Received: from moscow.sco.com by fiasco.sco.COM id aa01808; Tue, 29 Jan 91 13:43:07 PST From: natei@sco.COM (Nathaniel Ingersoll) X-Mailer: SCO System V Mail (version 3.2) To: billk brianm daveu davidv evanh joed johnd jonl keithr kevinw louisi michaelb steph ucscc!sun!argv ucscc!ucscb!clp ucscc!ucscb!garlick Subject: Re: History of UCSCB Forums Date: Tue, 29 Jan 91 13:40:41 PST Message-ID: <9101291340.aa14005@moscow.sco.COM> Status: OR : About Operating systems, ucscb was a PDP 11/70 running V7. Sometime : Around 86, Steph Marr convinced the computer center to get : a copy of the 2.9 tape from the computer center at Davis and Jim Haynes : got ucscb up and running as a 2.9 machine. This allowed people : to start experimenting with sockets and TCP/IP on the PDP. : I think the summer of 86, they switched to a new hardware platform. : Thus 2.9 was only around for about 3 months. Actually, from when I got there ('82) until the 2.9 tape, "unix b" was running a hybrid V7 mixed with enhancements pulled out of BSD2.8 by haynes.   From steph Tue Jan 29 14:22:30 1991 Received: from moscow.sco.com by fiasco.sco.COM id aa02293; Tue, 29 Jan 91 14:22:29 PST From: steph@sco.COM (Steph Marr) X-Mailer: SCO System V Mail (version 3.2) To: billk brianm daveu davidv evanh joed johnd jonl keithr kevinw louisi michaelb natei sun!argv ucscc!ucscb!clp ucscc!ucscb!garlick Subject: Re: History of UCSCB Forums Date: Tue, 29 Jan 91 14:19:38 PST Message-ID: <9101291419.aa14540@moscow.sco.COM> Status: OR The "fire Dennie" thing was a direct result of Dennie abusing root privs and chmod'ing everyone's home directory to 700. This pissed me off, so I made use of a know security flaw in msgs and edited a dennie message to make it look like dennie had finally figured out that he was incompetent, and that he should resign. however, his incompetence prevented him from doing so, so anyone with any knowledge about how he might go about this should call him at **his actual home phone number** any time, day or night, preferably at 3:00am collect from Tel Aviv. The Subject: line said "I am a TWID (read this one kidz!). This got msgs immediately wiped (well, 6 or 7 hours later), and msgs didn't come back up for about a week. At that point, O.W. Jones stopped contributing to the various forai and (not) Dennie started. Later, and underground games shell called ngsh (for (not) the Games Shell) was run by (not) Dennie. Should we tell him about how grimjak and rayond's accounts were "disappeared?" No one has mentioned SMUTforum, the precursor to chunkstyle. I think Andy wrote forum first. Steve All may have hacked on it, but not much I don't think. Steve was more into accidentally destroying filesystems and barely holding onto his accounts. The student convergence upon CORC might be an interesting tale.... Steph.   From ucscc!mailer-daemon Mon Jan 28 19:21:41 1991 Received: from viscous.sco.com by fiasco.sco.COM id aa22162; Mon, 28 Jan 91 19:21:37 PST Received: by ucscc.UCSC.EDU (5.65/1.35) id AA01150; Mon, 28 Jan 91 19:15:18 -0800 Date: Mon, 28 Jan 91 19:15:18 -0800 From: ucscc!MAILER-DAEMON (Mail Delivery Subsystem) Subject: Returned mail: Host unknown Message-Id: <9101290315.AA01150@ucscc.UCSC.EDU> To: sco!billk Status: OR ----- Transcript of session follows ----- 550 sun!argv... Host unknown ----- Unsent message follows ----- Received: by ucscc.UCSC.EDU (5.65/1.35) id AA01148; Mon, 28 Jan 91 19:15:18 -0800 Received: from fiasco.sco.COM by huey.sco.COM id aa03256; Mon, 28 Jan 91 18:50:05 PST From: "William K. Karwin" Date: Mon, 28 Jan 1991 18:48:58 PST Secret-Identity: The Easter Bunny X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.1.1 5/02/90) To: billk@sco.COM, brianm@sco.COM, daveu@sco.COM, davidv@sco.COM, evanh@sco.COM, joed@sco.COM, johnd@sco.COM, jonl@sco.COM, keithr@sco.COM, kevinw@sco.COM, louisi@sco.COM, michaelb@sco.COM, natei@sco.COM, steph@sco.COM, sun!argv@sco.COM, ucscb!clp@sco.COM, ucscb!garlick@sco.COM Subject: History of UCSCB Forums Message-Id: <9101281849.aa21762@fiasco.sco.COM> Time for a trip down memory lane... :-) Evan Hunt and I started talking about the evolution of source code for forums on UCSCB earlier the other evening. We got quite a bit of information about who wrote what and who influenced whom, but I'd like to check with you old timers :) to get corrections, additions, etc. Pretentious title follows: MODERN DAY GUTENBERGS: AUTHORS OF MULTI-USER FORUMS AT UCSC The earliest author of forum code we know of was Nate Ingersoll. The only information we have of his early forum is that it influenced later work. Dan Heller seems to have worked on forums too, but we are unclear as to how much his products were actually used. Brian Moffett was influenced by Nate's and Dan's work to write "dforum" (d for dorimay). It is unclear if this was a hack on previous code, or original code inspired by existing forums. Jim Kinoshita built on to dforum, but that version didn't go very far. Evan Hunt built on Jim's work, but he didn't do much more. In 1985 Keith Reynolds acquired Nate's source. He used this and also was influenced by dforum, to create "sforum" (s for shonnon). This was very popular and many forums used this source. About this time, Chuck Peterson wrote the multi-node "tforum" (t for tree-structured), presumably from scratch. This code was fixed, modified, and updated for years, but "/usr/games/tforum" remained as a staple of UCSCB users. Jon Luini and Evan Hunt both wrote remote tforum clients. A new version of Chuck's work is in place even now, as /usr/public/forum. It's less buggy and more popular than ever. In 1986, Jon Luini became interested in writing forums. He acquired sforum, and wrote "SHADES", which evolved into the multi-node forum, "romp". A rewrite was called "uromp", then the single-node "gazebo", and finally another multi-node version of gazebo called "gromp". Gazebo and gromp survive today on UCSCB. They are full of useful and fun features, but this makes them slow programs to use. Nate Ingersoll wrote Q+A, a networked graphical forum, about this time. Though it was the first UCSC forum to have been designed as a distributed forum, it had an unfamiliar interface, authentication problems, and mostly technical subject matter, so it didn't become very popular, and eventually fell into disrepair. In 1987, Bill Karwin acquired sforum, fixed some bugs and added some features to create "cforum" (c is for C). This source is still used by several privately-owned forums on UCSCB, including the mainstay of private forums, Romance Forum. Fewer features, but faster than gazebo. Bill has also written forums in csh and sh, and made an attempt at implementing a forum using only sed. I used UCSCB back in 1979, when it apparently still ran System V. There was "/usr/games/gsh forum", written and managed by persons unknown to me, and there were also at least two private forums, but I didn't know how to use directories and pathnames very well, so I didn't become familiar with these. I recall that none of the forums were tree-structured. At some point, the forum in /usr/games became known as "Overforum", as a pun on the underground, privately owned "Underforum". Can any of you guys add to or correct this information? What was the forum technology before 1984? What was the policy of CATS toward forums over the years? What forum sources became most popular? If you know the current email address of anyone else who worked on (i.e. not just used) unix b forums between the late 70's and early 80's, and would be interested in contributing to the scholarly study of local history, :-) please let me know, and I'll mail them too. Just a collector of trivia, -Bill   From kevinw Tue Jan 29 14:55:42 1991 Received: from scovert.sco.com by fiasco.sco.COM id aa02662; Tue, 29 Jan 91 14:55:41 PST From: kevinw@sco.COM (Kevin Wang) X-Mailer: SCO System V Mail (version 3.2) To: billk Subject: Re: History of UCSCB Forums Date: Tue, 29 Jan 91 14:56:20 PST Message-ID: <9101291456.aa06460@scovert.sco.COM> Status: OR Tforum appeared after the Schlenger forum crackdown, and everyone could create a node...Still, private fora were popular, since it gave the owner more control over the forum. Cathouse was around before you wrote your forum, I'm pretty sure. It might have used a hacked keithr-forum, but I think it was a different program than RF was using at the time. Maybe Glenn had something to do with it? From billk Tue Jan 29 14:31:07 1991 Received: from fiasco.sco.COM by scovert.sco.COM id aa06005; Tue, 29 Jan 91 14:31:07 PST From: billk@sco.COM (William K. Karwin) Date: Tue, 29 Jan 1991 14:29:57 PST Secret-Identity: The Easter Bunny X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.1.1 5/02/90) To: kevinw (Kevin Wang) Subject: Re: History of UCSCB Forums Message-ID: <9101291429.aa02391@fiasco.sco.COM> Status: R Cathouse used my forum source. :-) What happened to tforum during the Schlenger forum crackdown? I don't remember... -Bill   From michaelb Tue Jan 29 15:39:40 1991 Received: from escargot.sco.com by fiasco.sco.COM id aa03048; Tue, 29 Jan 91 15:39:40 PST From: Michael Berman Date: Tue, 29 Jan 1991 15:39:01 PST Organization: SCO Systems Product Marketing Phone: 408-425-7222 x5179 Fax: 408-427-5417 X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.1.2 7/11/90) To: brianm Subject: Forum history Cc: billk (William K. Karwin), daveu, davidv, evanh, joed, johnd, jonl, keithr, kevinw, louisi, michaelb, natei, Steph Marr , sun!argv, ucscc!ucscb!clp, ucscc!ucscb!garlick Message-ID: <9101291539.aa05552@escargot.sco.COM> Status: OR In forum engineering history, I suppose I was the first manager to institute allow and deny restrictions. This was during the evil time when (do to the actions of the gang of four) forums (at least all the underground ones) were banned by CATS. This was after Brian had turned hacker forum over to me. I believe hacker forum, gay forum, and maybe fantasy forum (at one time) used my security implementation -- although other forums had similar restrictions. Michael [----------- Included message from Brian Moffet -----------] > Subject: Re: History of UCSCB Forums > Date: Jan 29, 12:23 From brianm Tue Jan 29 11:40:00 1991 From: brianm@sco.COM (Brian Moffet) Date: Tue, 29 Jan 1991 11:36:34 PST X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.1.2 7/11/90) Subject: Re: History of UCSCB Forums Message-ID: <9101291136.aa03587@scoville.sco.COM> > > Brian Moffett was influenced by Nate's and Dan's work to write "dforum" > (d for dorimay). It is unclear if this was a hack on previous code, or > original code inspired by existing forums. I was originally influenced by the forum source going around, and was going to modify it. However, I deleted the source, and so I wrote my forum (dforum?) from scratch. I can't remember the name, it was just the thing to do. :-) A fun feature regarding security was to encode the path for the data files in a cute quote, I had mine encoded in a song (American Pie I believe?) so that a core dump wouldn't show where the file were. After that, I determined that a much better method was what I called a circular forum, a message was divided into section or blocks, and you allowed only a certain number to exist in a data-base. I worked on this for a while, and when I got it finished, it became "hacking forum", where people could discuss various techno-babble. This is also where the "Fire Denny because he is incompetant" started up. I believe this forum influenced the tree-forum a bit, and was definately around for a while. Its major characteristic was a single data file, and almost no maintenance. brianm [------- End of included message from Brian Moffet --------] --   From: billk@sco.COM (William K. Karwin) Date: Tue, 29 Jan 1991 14:29:57 PST Secret-Identity: The Easter Bunny X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.1.1 5/02/90) To: kevinw (Kevin Wang) Subject: Re: History of UCSCB Forums Status: OR Cathouse used my forum source. :-) What happened to tforum during the Schlenger forum crackdown? I don't remember... -Bill   From altos!altos86.altos.com!clp Wed Jan 30 13:37:44 1991 Received: from viscous.sco.com by fiasco.sco.COM id aa16579; Wed, 30 Jan 91 13:37:42 PST Received: by altos.Altos.COM (5.52/smail2.5) id AA24408; Wed, 30 Jan 91 13:26:39 PST Received: by altos86.Altos.COM (Sendmail 5.52/Altos-1.0) id AA02373; Wed, 30 Jan 91 13:29:33 PST Date: Wed, 30 Jan 91 13:29:33 PST From: clp@altos86.Altos.COM (Chuck L. Peterson) Message-Id: <9101302129.AA02373@altos86.Altos.COM> To: billk@sco.com Subject: forum Status: OR Hmmm. My recollection of events is quite a bit different from your history. Let me see if I can remember the context of my involvement. In 1983, UNIX B was a PDP 11/70 running Version 7 with hacks from UCB and UCSC. The two games managers were Rob Mace(acct alfred) and his friend Steve something. Steve was really into Japanese Animation. This Steve guy was the author of the forum that resided in the gsh at that time, and he deliberately left the source readable in his account for all to play with. Dennie did not like this. Another guy named Steve All (acct steve) set up the undrforum in his account using the source from the gsh forum. It is my belief that at this time (84-85 year), most of the forum programs around were based on this same source. This version had the annoying feature of having to be "turned over". Every two months or so, the data files were moved to "data.old" and "dir.old", and messages would start again from 1. To access the old messages, you were required to run "oldforum" or "oldundrforum". Before I became a games manager, I had a shell in my account which was used to access many of the different forums. I secretly executed my own version forum based on the original source. My version accessed the legitimate data files (the path names were obtained with a core dump). My versions executed exactly the same as the original ones, except I added the "save to file" feature. This had the gsh managers a bit perplexed for a while. At that time, the source to the gsh was non existant. The two guys who wrote it, presumably Dan Daugherty and John Lemming, left a copyright in the binary and had since left UCSC. Rob Mace once told me that they never made the source public. Since this seemed like an easy project, I re-wrote gsh after becoming a games manager. (in fall 1985?) It was about this same time that I started working on tforum. Incidently, the 'T' is a computer-nerd pun playing on the convention in BSD where several test versions of programs start with 't'; like tcsh and some others. "Tree-Forum" was a cover. I emperically determined that mangling the the original forum source to do trees was unworkable. The first file format was that used by the original forum source. Others were then experimented with afterwards. Each time a new tforum with a different file format was installed in gsh, Tforum was completely reset. This happened a few times. Once tforum was somewhat stable, I moved the original forum to forum.old, and made forum a link to tforum. Steve All once sent me some correspondence indicating that he thought tforum was a much better idea than having 12 billion forum programs all over UNIX B. He would delete undrforum on the condition that I permanently place an undrforum node in tforum. After about 3 months of no use, I deleted undrforum node. Chuck L. Peterson clp@megadon.UUCP