15APR98

News9804

Editor: Campagnolo Assistant editor: Mr.T

Issue: 15 Volume: 6 Number: 2

Editorial .................... Contributors

Features ................... Sponsors

Next Issue ....................... Lists

Future Issues .................. Legal

Editorial: In the next month We are going to try to get two CitaNews issues ready. This one and one slated for the 1^st of May. From that point on we'll be shooting for a 1^st of the month issue every month. In future issues you will see a gradual shift in format from a newsletter to more of an "On-Line 'Zine".

We are looking for people who will be dedicated to writing articles for the CitaNews. If you are interested, please drop me e-mail.

By now you have probably already heard about the "citadel.org" domain and how some of us are planning to use it to launch a big public relations campaign for Citadel while simultaneously bringing added functionality and Internet connectivity to our little piece of the virtual world.

This idea was inspired by the first generation Citadel web site created by Lazarus and stored on www.citadel.org approximately two years ago. Naturally, two years in "Internet Time" is an eternity, so the information there has gotten a bit dated. But all of the history and genealogy stuff was quite useful in developing new content.

But it wasn't just a web site we were interested in. Some of the IGnet sysops and users decided that in addition to telling the world about Citadel through a web site, we would also make all of the world's Citadels accessible directly through the domain. We will go into greater detail about that in a moment.

The first task at hand was to obtain ownership of the citadel.org domain so we could set up new domain servers. Unfortunately, the current owner of the domain, Farokh Irani, refused to relinquish control of the domain, even though he is not involved in the Citadel scene at all anymore. He claimed that he didn't want to give it away to someone who would not keep the site up to date, even though he has done exactly that himself. So the world is stuck with a citadel.org domain that is forever doomed to contain outdated information.

After a few weeks of deliberation, we arrived at the new name, citadelia.org. Citadelia refers to the entire wonderful world of Citadel and Citadel-like room based BBS's, both the software that runs them and the communities that "live" on them. It is our own little corner of the online world, embracing and communicating with the rest of the world.

Naturally, the first thing we did was to get the domain servers and web site running. Some history documentation, back issues of CitaNews, pointers to existing BBS's and software repositories, all the usual stuff. Then the fun started.

These days, there are a number of Citadel systems accessible on the Internet. You can telnet to almost all of them; you can use a WWW browser to access many of them; you can even download special client software to get the most out of your online experience. Those BBS's with static IP addresses were immediately added to the domain. So you can telnet or www to "uncensored.citadel.org" and get connected to UNCENSORED! BBS, for example.

Then we got around to addressing a new problem, one that is now facing hobbyist sysops with limited budgets. Internet access has gotten inexpensive enough that many of us can now afford to keep a dedicated phone line connected to a local Internet provider 24 hours a day, thereby making our systems available on the Internet. But many Internet providers will not offer static IP addresses, and those who do often charge a hefty fee. How do people find your BBS when its IP address changes a couple of times a week? The answer is Citadelia Dynamic DNS. This is similar to any of the other DDNS setups you may have read about, but this one's dedicated to Citadel BBS's. Simply obtain a simple client program, and have your system run it whenever its PPP connection goes online. You now have a permanent host name that will always map to the IP address of your system.

Then we got really fancy. Tinkering with Linux, sendmail, and Citadel/UX, we have managed to route Internet e-mail to all systems on the Cit86Net. Routing outbound mail to the Internet from Cit86Net works, too. This means that all of you, regardless of which BBS you call, have access to Internet e-mail. I will write up more about this functionality once we have a few "safe" mail routers set up. Those of us who have dialup Internet connections do not want to get in trouble with our ISP's for "redistributing" their service.

The current coordinators of the citadel.org domain are Freakdog@dogpound2, Campagnolo@gwnorth, and myself, Ignatius T Foobar@uncnsrd. Contact any of us if you would like to get involved. It would also help if anyone who would like to take advantage of these new offerings could kick in $10 or so to help offset the cost of the domain registration.

Long live Citadelia!

What follows is the transcript of an e-mail article that CrT was gracious enough to write for us.

[CitaNews] I am wondering if you would be interested in writing a short Bio of your work with Citadel and your life since. (yes, we realize that there is life after Citadel ;) I like to feature your words in the April 15th issue which will be available for reading on line at http://www.citadel.org/citanews .

[CrT] Not the April 1st issue? :)

[CitaNews] Recently a group of sysops got together and are hosting www.citadel.org as a site for all room based/ citadel type systems to share a domain. All Citadel systems will be able to have a FQDN like gwnorth.citadel.org and uncnsrd.citadel.org. We are also working on global networking and bringing the different factions together after many years of separation.

[CrT] After which, you will heel the Atlantic and reunite Gondwanaland? :)

Ah well -- one's achievements are limited by one's aspirations, and if aiming high produces many misses, the occasional splendid hit remains justification enough.

[CitaNews] I'm not looking to create Guru status for you (unless you want it), I just wanted to get something in your words regarding your days as the father of Citadel. What were your expectations for Citadel? Your goals? Is Citadel today where you envisioned it nearly 20 years ago?

[CrT] So, I'm now old enough to star in Where Are They Now columns? *teasinggrin*

I wrote up a little something for Citadel's 10th anniversary of which I think Gremlin got a copy; It otherwise didn't see the light of day.

Citadel started as a little 7-10 day project sandwiched between more serious projects. I was frustrated by the state of the BBS state of the art in Seattle at that point, which I felt was so bad as to come close to constituting implicit insult of every user, but (surprise...) nobody seemed to pay any attention to my suggestions for improvements.

So when I came up with the mildly cute idea of adding generation counts to pointers from rooms into the message base, so as to cleanly handle hanging pointers, I found the design so "technically sweet" (in a happy phrase from an unhappy project) that I just couldn't resist coding it up.

Since then, I've been doing more or less what I did before then: Coding up lots of ambitious little projects that get scrapped without ever seeing the light of day. It is somewhat reassuring to reflect occasionally that Citadel, at least, -did- get used in the end. :)

And arguably did more help than hurt to its users.

On the commercial front, I wrote all the original software for the Digital Anatomist project http://www1.biostr.washington.edu/DigitalAnatomist.html which produced various videodiscs and CDROMs which arguably improve to a small but not insignificant degree medical school education worldwide, and which in turn inspired the Visible Human project; I'm currently employed at Activerse working on Ding!, yet another computer-mediated human Communications tool.

Continued -->

On the noncommercial front, my current folly is Muq, http://muq.org/~cynbe/muq/muq.html, which is in part a follow-on project to Citadel -- still another computer-mediated human communication tool, albeit this time a half-decade project instead of a half-month one. There's some more recent-projects stuff on my (lame) http://muq.org/~cynbe page.

My original goals? I hoped that by -showing- the BBS world what I considered to be a better UI design, instead of just talking about it, I'd maybe have more success in influencing people to improve their designs. I expected the code to be a throwaway -- who in the micro world had ever heard of C? Everyone wrote in BASIC back then. (It's a little odd to see Minibin listed as a Citadel these days, considering that it predated the first Citadel by a year or so. That's flattery of a most honest sort, one must suppose.)

(I only wrote in C 'cause I couldn't afford a Pascal compiler -- $500, and I was living on $300-$600/mo in a $65/mo apartment -- but Leor Zolman was selling a C compiler for $125 or so, and C sounded about as good as Pascal -- I was willing to learn a new language to save $400.)

My original expectations? I expected Citadel to fade away once I dropped it. After all, there were only a handful of systems running it, and how many programs survive being dropped by their author? Never mind surviving translation from CP/M to MS-DOS. Certainly never mind surviving translation from 1981 MS-DOS to 1990s Unix-based Internet hosts. Most odd.

Even in retrospect, it is hard to imagine how a UI design optimized for single-user 300 baud dialup boxes servicing users running on a hodgepodge of character-based computers can still attract users a decade or two after the introduction of Macintosh, X windows &tc. Must be something valuable in the design, I suppose. I must also confess to suspecting a lack of effective innovation in pushing the envelope of computer-mediated human interaction... :) Citadel is in its way as implicitly insulting to the modern user as were in their way the BASIC BBSes that inspired it, given the intervening hardware advances. Or perhaps I underestimate the modern Citadel -- no offense intended to anyone.

Is Citadel today where I envisioned it two decades years ago?

Um -- can you honestly envision bitching bitterly about your computer maxing out at only sixteen exabytes of ram, say? Twenty years from now, that's about where we're likely to be. (Work it out.)

Twenty years ago, Citadel was described as "ram-intensive, but fast once loaded" because it was such a monster, maxing out a 48K CP/M machine all by itself and taking seemingly forever to load all that code off floppy.

Of course the fat CP/M OS kernel chewed up 8K all by itself, and you had to leave some K for data, so you were lucky to get 20-30K for actual code. I remember going through the code shortening error messages by a few bytes to open up enough code space for a bugfix. Finally I started moving the error messages to disk...

Not too long before writing Citadel, I had come to the disconsolate conclusion that I would never in my life be able to afford a 64K home computer.

Not because 64 1K static ram cards would have cost me $64,000, but because they would have required a motherboard with 64 S100 connectors, and there was just no electrically plausible way to jumper that many motherboards together.

Twenty years ago, I was using Arpanet, reading netnews, subscribing to SF-Lovers, trying to bring a little of that home to the BBS scene: I introduced smileys into the Seattle BBS scene from the Internet, and occasionally forwarded netnews stuff. The room-based design of Citadel must have been influenced to some degree by the newsgroup layout of netnews, and the store-and-forward networking hooks I put into Citadel 2.x were informed by a desire to bring something of the spaciousness of Arpanet to the disjointed BBS world. I'm mildly amazed networking eventually got implemented, and of course mildly disappointed it pretty much got scooped by Fidonet...

One reason I lost interest technically in Citadel was the inherent limitations of dialup modems: I made a mental note to wait until proper packet-switched connections went mass-market before paddling again in that pool. (Viva PPP! I saw my first Ricochet modem in use this weekend, on a laptop hosting a webserver... won't be too long until I can be online anywhere in the world, can get live streaming MPEG3 video from my radio-controlled glider even when it's a continent away, and can have an array of scenically located "spycams" in wilderness areas supplying my root window background...)

Anyhow: No, I wouldn't have dreamed of guessing where Citadel would be more than about five years in the future, even if I'd expected it to survive on its lonesome. I wouldn't have dreamed of the fiercely possessive BBS authors then busily peddling their various BASIC hacks ever wanting their code included in a Citadel family, or of the Citadel code itself propagating so wildly. I certainly never imagined for a moment a multi-user variant like Citadel/UX running on a Unix box.

(I do remember the moment I picked the "Citadel" name, and realized with an odd start that I had, in a period of a few seconds, lying flat on my back, measurably influenced the future behavior of hundreds, maybe even thousands, of other people, most of whom I'd never meet. Sort of a minor power trip, I suppose *wrygrin*.)

Citadel seems to have nucleated a number of nice communities worldwide, which makes me happy. It would be fatuous to say I'm proud of that, since claiming pride is claiming responsibility, which goes properly to the people involved and a little luck. But I'm happy to have caught glimpses of these communities in passing over the years: The Universe is arguably a slightly better for having hosted Citadel, and I had the privilege of watching some of the good bits happen.

--Cynbe@muq.org

Next Issue (1MAY98) ROLL CALL! I need all developers of ANY citadel related BBS to contribute a quick run down on the development and features of their BBS.

Future Issues (1JUN98) June starts off Summer, and what better then to feature what is HOT in Citadelia! Are you a developer with NEW features that puts your Citadel on the TOP of the heap for your platform? If so, we want to hear from you!

Sections to be added to future issues of CitaNews: Births, (new BBS's in the world). Obituary, (death reports). Netted Rooms, (new rooms to share and who has them). New Features, (new additions to any Citadel system or new variants of Citadel). Current Affairs, (Things in the news that can effect the way you BBS). Lists, (list of systems joining Citadelia, Lists of anything else that needs to be listed. [Note: a separate page will be created to catalog different lists and the new additions or removals will be mentioned here.]

If you have any ideas of things that should be added or featured, please feel free to contribute your thoughts.

Contributors in this issue. Our thanks goes out to:

IGnatius T Foobar , Cynbe ru Taren

Freakdog @ Dogpond2 and CompuComIS for hosting this site.

Currently all of the known Internet systems can be found at URL http://www.citadel.org/list. Dial-up BBS's will be added later. If anyone has additions for the list, feel free to pass them our way.

This issue of CitaNews edited by Michel Poulin. If you wish to assist or contribute to a future issue, please send e-mail to Michel Poulin at mpoulin@linux2.compucomis.net. All submissions must be made no later then 10 days before the issue date (normally the First of each month)

There is no copyright unless expressed by the author of an article. No guarantee of accuracy can be made. Use at your own risk. Do not run with scissors! Turn off your ignition before fueling your vehicle. Do not exceed the posted limit. Turn Signals, USE THEM. Look before you walk. Think before you talk. If you paid for this software, someone is ripping you off! Remove the offending Operating System. RTFM. ROFL. TTFN.