drealmBBS - Bulletin Board System for Linux
Copyright (C) 1994, 1995  Inge Cubitt and Peter Jones
You may copy this file, but you must not change it.

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          A long, long time ago, on an operating system far away...

                                     Or

                        You got yours, an' I got mine

                                     Or

       How you come to have a package called drealmBBS, of all things

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First off, this is me, Peter, writing.  Just so you know.

Let's skim it.  I joined PRESTEL (a Viewdata/Videotext system run by British
Telecom) in early 1985.  I was using a BBC Micro with a simple Viewdata
terminal.  Wow, was I impressed.  I mean it!  40 column colour graphics at
1200/75 split speed.  And hundreds of people to talk to!  And, err... online
charges...

Then someone mentioned that there were other things out there to call than
PRESTEL (I knew this, but how do I find the phone numbers?!).  But, err...
you don't get 40 column colour graphics.  Unless, of course, you call a BBC
Micro BBS with a terminal that passes through the control codes.

That's by the by, except that the terminal of choice was CommSoft, written
by SoftMachinery.  One of the SoftMachinery guys ran an area on PRESTEL, and
was known as "The Gnome".  When the PRESTEL area folded, the SoftMachinery
guys regrouped.  They wrote their own system and it was christened "The
Gnome at Home", as that's where it was born.  This, too, was a Viewdata
system.  Over time, it became a great system (to the extent that PRESTEL
even used it for their test system).  It allowed remote users to edit online
and post message and even have interactive chat (when the autognome was
willing...).  The Gnome at Home host software became known as the
Auto(g)nomic Host system.  It used the same modem drivers as CommSoft.

Sometime during the previous paragraph, I called up The Gnome at Home.  And
it was good.  I started running an area.  At that time, due to the
incredible number of people called "Peter" on PRESTEL, I was using the
handle of a FRPG character, "Rocky the Dwarf".  The area I ran was called
"DwarfTalk" (I still have some of the original viewdata frames backed up on
floppy, I think).  This started, as the name implies, as somewhere to just
chat.  I ran a FRPG game on it, too.  The area attracted a following and
expanded.  It became The Dwarfen Realm.  It also became rather more than I
wanted to be editing over the phone!

So I splashed out.  My computer collection became three BBC Micros - one
running a network fileserver, one running the Viewdata host and one running
anything else I wanted... occasionally, my homebrew chat system.

By this time, the modem had been upgraded to a simple 2400 modem and could
take incoming calls.  So, what the heck, I'll let people in for a look
around.

Then, horror of horrors.  Through some advanced application of Murphy's Law,
The Gnome at Home hard drive crash and could not be recovered from backup.
The drive also had all the "gpaid gwerk" on it that would have brought in
money to replace the disk.  The system was down.  When it came back up, it
was limping.  It never truely recovered.

Around that time, must have been about 1988, I joined Compulink Information
Exchange (CIX, a CoSy system, a little like BIX but heavily customised).
Ugh.  80 columns, no colour.  Everyone nattering on about IBM PCs...  Ugh.
But there was quite a lively social side to it, too.  "Proper" chat, monthly
get-togethers.  Okay, so I was about 40 miles away - but you learn to cope
with that, living outside London...  I coped.  I also bought an Acorn
Archimedes R140, which ran BSD4.3.

While hanging out with the CIX bunch, I met Inge.  She'd just started
running a BBS on her Amstrad 1640 (or was it an expanded 1512?).  It had two
lines (at times).  You could talk to Inge.  It was called "Inge's Computer".
Inge moved house and the BBS became <<<FLYOVER<<<, because of the local
scenery, and had two lines all the time.  I also had more on it.

I moved into London.  That was late 1989.  By late 1990, I'd moved the rest
of the way, and The Dwarfen Realm and <<<FLYOVER<<< were running from the
same premises.

Inge wanted to run a "proper" multi-user system.  The "chat door" on
<<<FLYOVER<<< had some amusing habits.  My archimedes could handle multiple
logins under BSD.  So we started sorting out how to use that to allow two
local and two remote logins to chat.  We put off the problem that the archie
only had one serial port...  Eventually, we had a system where a BBC micro
could log in over Econet, a PC could log in (and hang... oh well) over
Ethernet, the console could be used and a single caller could log in.  It
went "live"!

We were running a rather naff bit of BBS software for a while.  We didn't
like the way it did somethings.  So we wrote a C-Shell wrapper to do things
"our" way and used the BBS just for message areas.  The C-Shell scripts
eventually took over.  Yeah!  A BBS written in Shell scripts!  We even made
it so people couldn't do CTRL-C and mess about freely...  We had chat
working so that you could chat while doing anything!

But it needed a name.  Well, "The Dwarfen Realm".  Obviously.  Hmmm, but I
just got a UUCP mail feed.  I nearly had it feeding to the Viewdata BBS,
too!  (I love sendmail... grrrrr :-) ) That needed a seven character name...
"drealm" was born (with a byte to spare!).

Still, it only had one line.  Hmmm...  We kept trying to get the PC to talk
ethernet to the Archie, and vice versa, in the hope we could use the PC as a
terminal server (and save several thousand quid).  No chance.  Someone on
CIX was advertising several Convergent Technologies S/80s with EIGHT SERIAL
PORTS!  We got one.  It ran System V Release ermmm... 3? 2? circa 1988
vintage.  So we had to convert the scripts...  Goodness it was slow compared
with the archie.  You could *hear* every "goto" in the C-Shell scripts.  Oh
well.  We put all the modems on.  Everyone was very impressed.  This is
about 1991 through to 1992.

How slow?  Response time was in minutes... (well, almost).  Something had to
be done.  Neither I nor Inge could write fluently in C.  What we needed was
a C-Shell compiler or something.  A rather odd man brought us PERL.  He even
mentioned how amazed he was at getting it installed on our machine in his
column in a rather large computer mag.  We were converted.  We started work
on the scripts.

Wow.  It runs!  It still took an age to load up, and the poor CT S/80 tended
to say "Out of memory!" when more than one person was running the scripts.
By now, we had four external lines plus four local. So we made a "one at a
time" gateway from the C-Shell scripts to the PERL scripts.  People took
turns to read all their messages at a decent rate.

We tried, for a while, to slim the scripts.  We phoned up Convergent
Technology, who had become Unisys, and asked what another 1Mb RAM would
cost.  They named their price and we bought a 486DX50 with 16Mb, plus
Consensys V4 (AT&T System V Release 4 by any other name).  After getting the
system stable (how many disk crashes does it take to install SVR4... it's no
joke...) - no, _before_, we went live.  It ran fast!

The scripts were polished and enhanced.  We made them available for download
via several BBSes and via Internet from our IP provider (see, we moved on
from UUCP).  We only heard of two installed sites and we've no idea if
anyone else is/was running the PERL scripts.  Version numbers ran from 0.01
through to 0.05.  0.05 went out no later than 11 March 1994.

In the meantime, I'd been starting to write bits of the PERL in C, to save
memory.  We upgraded to 32Mb.  That helped.  At the start of 1994 we gave
in.  Inge had been sending herself to sleep learning C from books.  We sat
down and started writing the whole thing in C.

Converting from C-Shell to PERL had been a nightmare.  Mostly because there
was no structure to the C-Shell scripts.  The PERL started off that way, but
we'd split it down to reduce memory usage.  It ported to C pretty much
routine by routine.  Except the menus...  The PERL system had already
developed the idea of a main loop, prompt scripts and menu scripts. However,
the scripts were written in PERL.  We didn't want to have to recompile for
every menu change.  So we wrote the menu driver.

We were aiming to have the beta version out before the end of August.  Beta
0.4 went out around 11 October 1994.  0.5 went out about midday on 20
November 1994.  0.6 was GPLed for Christmas.

It's now Sun Dec 25 00:09:30 GMT 1994.

-- Peter Jones
thanatos@drealm.org
