Citadel

Citadel

Original author(s)	Jeff Prothero (aka Cynbe ru Taren)
Initial release	December 1981 (1981-12)
Discontinued	2.40 (?) / 1982 (1982) (?)
Written in	BDS C
Operating system	CP/M
Child of	The start of it all.
Parent to	BabeCit, Citadel-86, Stonehenge, SacCit-80

Citadel

These days, Citadel/UX has taken to calling itself Citadel. This article is about the original Citadel, as such Cit/UX should always be referred to as Citadel/UX on this wiki unless quoting from their material.

Remarks

 82Dec07
 Citadel was written in mid-December 1981 by CrT.
Miraculously, it ran three days unattended over
New Year's, collecting some remarkably favorable reactions.
During the months that it ran at 633-3282 (ODD-DATA),
Citadel became one of the more popular BBs in town, and
there was some disappointment when a hardware failure forced the system
down in February of 1982.  But in January CrT had published the 
source code in BDS C, putting it in the public domain.

 David Mitchell brought up the next incarnation of the Citadel 
program in April of 1982, running on hardware provided by Richard 
Knox.  Called the Island Communication System, it is located on 
Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound.  ICS has about 30 regular users 
and about 120 log entries.  Newcomers find it easy to learn, and 
often leave messages praising it.  Some of the system's daily 
users are in Boston.

 Citadel is descended from DandD.pas, an adventure game editor/driver.
It is arranged as a series of rooms, starting with the LOBBY.  In each
room the user can read existing messages and leave more. There may be 
up to 128 rooms in the current implementation. The system was brought 
up with only one room, the LOBBY. Additional rooms were created by 
the users, with room names appropriate to the topics covered.

 This is being written (82Dec07) as the Version 2 beta-test goes out.
Version 1 got a friendly reception and had relatively few bugs.  We'll
see if this is a trend or fluctuation...

  Environment:  Citadel has had a checkered past.  It first ran
on a 64K Heath H89 with Magnolia CP/M, Hayes Smartmodem (plus an 
acoustic on another port) and BDS C V1.32.  Further development was 
done under BDS C 1.4x on a TRS-80 with Omikron CP/M, a Teletek FDC-1, 
and a Furgeson Big Board.  At present the ICS implementation runs on 
the FDC-1, while development is done on the Big Board. Version 2 was 
tested on the original H89, now with dual 8" SSDD drives :-) and a 
printer, Magnolia CP/M V2.223 :-( , and BDS C 1.46.

 Starting with the 82Jan posting on Seattle's MailBoard (thanks John!),
various fragments of Version 1 seem to have percolated around the country.
This version 2 release should supercede them and save people the frustration
of trying to make sense out of them.
 
David Mitchell
CrT

Other people involved in early versions of Citadel seem to be Bruce King (aka T'an T'u), who may have ported Citadel 2.0 to run on Unix as Citadel 2.10, and Andy Meyer, who ran Citadel 2.16s on a Sony CP/M machine.

From the BBS Documentary

Of the Citadel Source file below, Gene Buckle writes "This is the source code to the original Citadel for CP/M, written by Cynbe ru Taren (Jeff Prothero) in 1981. All room systems are decended from either this exact code base or based upon the "room system" concept that it expresses. There are two other known versions of the original CP/M source code out there. Versions 2.15 and 2.20 have been "seen in the wild". This archive includes all documentation as well as menus and help files. A compiled Citadel is also included. It requires BDS C to compile if you're going to try it under CP/M. Leor Zolman, the author of BDS C, has make this compile available on his website http://www.bdsoft.com for free. See the entery under the "free tools" link."

Citadel files

File	Size	Date
Citadel v2.10 source code	124,270 bytes	December, 1982
Front-End for the Bellevue RCP/M Citadel BBS (1985)	17,521 bytes