drealmBBS - Bulletin Board System for *nix
Copyright (C) 1994  Inge Cubitt and Peter Jones

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

The GNU General Public License should be in a file called COPYING.

Release 0.1 of drealmBBS
------------------------

Our very first drealm BBS was simply a set of Unix commands held together by
Cshell scripted menus.  It took about a minute to interpret every menu
selection, and there were always lost souls wandering about in the shell who
had fallen out of Emacs by accident while posting mail-to-sysop.

Our first public releases were 0.03/4/5, prototypes written in Perl scripts,
thanks to Larry Wall who designed that wonderful language.

0.03 had the menu options hard-coded into the main function scripts for each
level, but by 0.05 the menu scripts were separate and easily configurable by
anyone who could pick up the rudiments of Perl.

Eventually, the size and complexity of the system meant that it was no longer
feasible by reasons of speed and memory requirements to continue running
through a largely interpretive language, and it was recoded in POSIX-compliant
C, and released as drealmBBS 0.1

The main differences which will appear to the sysop setting up drealmBBS now
are that menus are no longer written in a computer programming language.  They
use a set of simplified commands provided by the bbs application itself, and
in almost all cases arguments are optional, eliminating the need for learning
syntax.  There are fields set up to take such details as minimum and maximum
user security levels, and min and max times for any option to be available.

There is a system of status flags for users and for message areas, most of
which are sysop-definable.



