Compuserve

[Grant Taylor]

On 1/10/21 7:16 PM, James B DiGriz wrote:
> Synchronet is still very much "a thing".

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.

> I'm not familiar with the message base format it uses,

"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.

> and a lot will depend on the version you have,

I'm guessing it's from '95 - '99.  2.x or 3.x comes to mind.

> but there should be utilities available for exporting messages directly 
> from a mounted disk image, or at least a running instance.

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).

> Should something be available on the Synchronet website or Vertrauen 
> BBS. There is a support echo still on Fidonet, too, iirc.

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.

> Worst case you can read messages to a capture log, or export .QWK to 
> an offline reader with any version since the early '90s.

I'm sure there's something clever that we can do to get data out.  }:-)



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die