On 1/10/21 3:03 PM, James B DiGriz via cctalk wrote: I have a copy of a friend's BBS from back in the early 2000's. I'm sure that there is a way to extract messages from the echos. It's Synchronet if anyone wants to direct me how to extract things. -- Grant. . . . unix || die

On 1/10/21 7:16 PM, James B DiGriz wrote: Yes, and no. Yes, there is /a/ product named Synchronet, probably from the same vendor or subsidiary. However, I don't think that it is the /same/ product. More specifically, I believe that contemporary Synchronet is more of a suite of packages. And those packages are traditional Linux packages. I believe the old DOS / Windows (?) Synchronet package is LONG since dead. "JAM" message format comes to mind from conversations with the original SYSOP. Though I don't know if that's what Synchronet is using or something else from conversstion collisions. I'm guessing it's from '95 - '99. 2.x or 3.x comes to mind. I suspect the best thing to do would be to restore the VM, boot it, and see what I can find. MS-DOS 5.x or 6.x don't need many resources. I think the machine had a ~300 MB hard drive and ~32 MB of memory (if that). Is the echo /active/? I know that there are LOTS of newsgroups still in active files on news servers, even though the the newsgroup hasn't seen traffic in years. I'm sure there's something clever that we can do to get data out. }:-) -- Grant. . . . unix || die

At 04:03 PM 1/10/2021, James B DiGriz via cctalk wrote: From '85 until '94 or so, I saved my transcripts from visiting CompuServe, PeopleLink, Delphi, Genie, BIX, the Well, etc. I probably focused on Amiga forums. There are some CAD and 3D animation and programmer and Atari and Tandy M-100 forums, too. I was often free-flagged on CIS and many other services so surfing was free. For the kids out there, in today's dollars CompuServe was about $20 an hour. I had largely automated my visits with Pro-YAM on a PC. Log in, grab my personal email, upload the outgoing mail, scrape the forums I wanted to read, save it all to a text file, and then I'd read and edit in Brief at my leisure. Some of the time, my visits were not scripted. Then I'd squeeze them all into floppy-sized ZIPs for archiving. At some point I copied all those floppies to the active storage I use and backup now. My archives aren't pristine backups. I erased many posts that I thought were uninteresting at the time. As I read, I compulsively reformatted paragraphs with Brief's word-wrap macro. The largest part of my archive was CompuServe. In 2015 I wrote a little Perl parser to separate individual forum posts. I have about 400 megs of messages, on the order of 525,000 messages. I split each post into its own XML file, tagging the pieces (from, to, subject, etc.) I've left the hard part of constructing the web software to make it all readable and searchable. There are a few problems to solve. You'd want to impose some structure on it all. A topic such as "Amiga" had several forums... user, programmer, arts, vendors. Enter a forum and it would tell you the range of message numbers available and the number of the last one you've read. At that point I'd generally say "read all new." Each forum had a dozen or so numbered sections. Sections had names and they changed over time. Posts have a number and replies mention the parent message in the subject line, so they're kind of threaded. An example: #: 126608 S0/Sysop's Corner 29-Oct-95 00:20:12 Sb: #126546-#Problem Uploading Files Fm: Betty Clay 76702,337 To: Shawn/Silent Paw 74777,2602 (X) This would be caused by the entire forum running out of blocks in the library. Steve handles that, and I'm sure he has noticed and requested more by now. It is quite likely that we won't get them before Monday, though. Sometimes there's no one around to handle the request on weekends. Like this message, some sections were "sysop" and perhaps should be considered non-public. My transcripts also have stuff from before and after the forum posts. Who knows, maybe someone would find interesting the "What's new this week" intro menu you'd see at login. Or better yet, the file libraries. Each section had a "data library". Each file showed a filename, timestamp and size, uploader PPN and name, and title line and keywords and a paragraph of description. I have some listings of the file areas. I may also have the original files I downloaded. All that could be linked into a new web version, too. Maybe there are some text-based public live group chats (conferences), too. So how could you organize all that into a web database and interface? It has some similarities to Usenet posts. But not quite. The sections change over time. It would also make sense for me to improve my parser to separate out each email I sent or received. I'd be eager to release the public forum posts but I also don't want to release my private emails. Am I going to trust my parser to have never made a mistake? Or do I need to read a half-million posts to confirm it didn't? I have to believe that other people saved transcripts of CompuServe forums if not other services, too. Ideally there could be a way to add everyone's messages to the reconstruction. Indeed, google ' "Sb:" "Fm:" "To:" sysop cis ' and you'll see other bits and pieces of CompuServe transcripts. https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Sb%3A%22+%22Fm%3A%22+%22To%3A%22+sysop+c… I don't know what it was like inside CIS back then, but I can't help but wonder if any magtape archives left the building. I asked an Amiga forum owner if he saved anything... he said "no" but maybe other forum owners did. As an aside, keep in mind that the people running CIS forums held a contract with CIS and they were paid. For many, it was their sole income. Some ran several forums and made quite a bit of money at it. I was very surprised to learn the web-based http://forums.compuserve.com/ existed until three-four years ago. - John

As a young lad, the high costs of things like CompuServe is why I stuck to BBS systems, until the internet came along. That is awesome! You should definitely get that stuff on the web!! Could you put a text front end on it that emulates the original CIS? A modern emulator that emulated the UI from the original on the internet.. Makes sense Search for your name?

On Sun, Jan 10, 2021 at 6:46 PM John Foust via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote This is an incredible archive on its own. Are you willing to share the source files? I'd enjoy just wandering through the raw data. It's probably been over 30 years since I've even seen the CIS forum message format (not counting a few moments ago, of course.) -j

At 09:56 AM 1/12/2021, James B DiGriz via cctalk wrote: Do you have a link to it? Disk images of what, from where? CompuServe? - John

On Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 3:03 PM James B DiGriz via cctalk < cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: I have some fidonet echos for the DEC Rainbow I downloaded from one of the archives... There will have been pieces saved here and there, but mostly on floppies or Yes. Indeed. Warner