[Coco] Caring for a CoCo

[William Schaub]

On 11/18/2009 08:03 PM, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 7:43 PM, John W. Linville
> <linville at tuxdriver.com>  wrote:
>    
>> On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 06:02:04PM -0600, George Ramsower wrote:
>>      
>>> You have ME wondering...
>>> What sort of server are you considering?
>>>        
>> Considering Aaron's other project, I'd have to presume that he is
>> thinking about a multi-line BBS...
>>
>> Am I right?? :-)
>>
>>      
> Yes, something like that :)
>
> I haven't yet found an OS-9 BBS that is public domain/open source and
> supports multiple lines.
> Anybody have suggestions?
>
> -Aaron
>
>
>    
With the work on-going getting curses working. I would think you could 
simply write one in C and use file
locking (if OS9 support file locking) and multiple instances of the BBS 
program running
for each terminal program.  Just spawn the BBS executable instead of a 
shell or at least while
testing just execute it from the command line.  I would love to take a 
crack at this by the way.
It wouldn't be fancy but you could at least get some basic message 
boards going.

What would be even cooler would be an implementation of usenet on OS9. A 
traditional news spool should be easy enough to implement and I bet 
there is a UUCP implementation around that could allow a multi-bbs 
network setup to happen. I'm already working on a networking project 
that uses usenet (http://teotwawki.steubentech.com)

A news spool and news reader implementation shouldn't be too hard to 
come up with if you aren't
trying to implement NNTP. I will have to find an old copy of B news or 
something and see how this
sort of thing was done before usenet went to TCP/IP and NNTP and you had 
small nodes (I know it was set up on MS-DOS systems back in the day)

At the very least I'm sure you could make a very simple BBS system 
(regardless of if its Network News based)
with some simple files, a locking mechanism, and a simple C program that 
can run for each logged in user.
You could even do this without curses. just do simple ASCII only and use 
plain old stdio.