On Thu, July 28, 2005 8:19 pm, Jim Brain said:
Can you describe the system to me? Did you issue the
Q packets
yourself, or did you operate at a higher level?
As for the Stratus emulator idea, I would be the last to discourage
someone to embark on this, but I'm mainly interested in bringing the
client back. Adding functionality via PL/1 is not my idea of a
challenge. More like misery....
Even assuming there was a working stratus emulator out there, the practical
difficulties of first getting access to the server code (now owned by
Time-Warner), and then figuring out how it all goes together - I'd say trying
to get the authentic system up and running is a "tilting at windmills", unless
aol wants to help to recreate corporate history.
I'm not entirely sure the code I worked with was the same as the qlink code,
or if qlink was a frozen system off on it's own machines using an earlier
version of the system. I do remember that some of the other systems that were
sunsetted at the same time (pc-link, and I think applelink) were in my source
code with if-thens for client pecularities.
From my programmer's point of view, it was an event
driven system - I called a
library routine to register that my routine X handled a
particular client
token. When a user clicked a button on a form, it would send down a specific
token and some data, which the front-end layers would decode, check it's token
table to see who handled it, then call the handler and pass the data. The
handler routine would do something, then send back to the client another token
and data. There were a lot of system routines in between me and the client
that would take care of formatting and sending the data to and from the
client.
Most valuable to you would be the list of tokens, their data, and what they
were supposed to do. I really can't remember if qlink was very similar to the
later pc-link, appplelink, and eventually aol clients. Aol's client had (and
probably still has) it's own complicated form description language - it qlink
spoke that, you won't get very far unless you can find a leaked manual on the
web somewhere for the particular dialect it spoke.
I do know there was a leaked or reverse engineered token list from when aol
hacking was all the rage. I suspect that qlink used a subset of those, that
each client added to what was already there, instead of completely reinventing
it.
Wow, I haven't thought about this stuff in years.
Jeff