Fnordadel

<fnord>adel

Original author(s)	Adrian Ashley (aka Elim) Royce Howland (aka Mr. Neutron)
Developer(s)	Arthur Dent
Initial release	1990 (1990)
Discontinued	v1.33-38 / July 1993 (1993-07)
Written in	Mark Williams C
Platform	Atari ST
Child of	STadel

<fnord>adel

In January of 1989 we obtained the source to STadel V3.3b-199 from orc. We started diddling around with it, putting in little feeps here and there. After doing many diddles to it, not the least of which was switching from gawd-awful Alcyon C to Mark Williams C, we finally began some fairly serious development at around the start of 1990. As this is being written (August of 1991) we're putting the final touches on the second public release (v1.32).

Among the major changes and improvements are such things as improved net compatibility with Citadel-86, and the elimination of many inherent limits such as 58 messages per room, 64 rooms per system, et cetera; as well, the Reference Manual is a substantial departure from past STadel practice. More recent additions include many security measures, a full-fledged file browser for transfer junkiew, the inclusion of a lot of features from orc's last version of STadel before he quit work on it (version 3.4a, which never got released), and a port to yet another compiler, gcc (the best one so far -- highly recommended to anybody). See increm.doc for a blow- by-blow account of changes to Fnordadel, although we started the list quite some time after we diverged from STadel.

Fnordadel runs only on the Atari ST and TT, and no ports are planned; certainly not to MS-DOS, which gives us the heebie-jeebies. Future plans include further improvement of network compatibility with Citadel-86, a bunch more network enhancements, and substantial code cleanup; plus lots more. You should see our list of suggestions! We might even get to some of them thanks to the fact that our development platform is now a gcc cross-compiler environment based on a NeXTstation. (No, we're not planning a port to the NeXT; the code will be totally thrown out and redone from scratch before that day arrives.)

Since we've been hacking on this beast other things have happened; orc has disappeared and released his code (STadel 3.4a) to the PD. cmc@@overmind has taken this code and is proceeding with his own PC version, calling it Fortress. We understand he has the ST version in beta at the moment, and we wish him luck.

Several local people here in Edmonton have helped us with Fnordadel; chief among these is Garth Wood (Not Quite Cricket), who has acted as a sort of permanent beta-tester and has helped with the documentation. Also David Wally Williscroft, who ran the tiniest Fnordadel in town on a 512k machine with one 360k drive, and helped by finding bugs faster than we could make them. Then we have our first non-local installations to thank, John Edstrom@@Poopsie in Calgary, Alberta, and Holly Stowe@@devnull in Indianapolis, Indiana (who has subsequently disappeared off the network). More recently, kbad@@Virtuality (somewhere near Atari Corp., USA) became the first TT030-based Fnordadel Sysop, and proofed the first draft of the Texinfo version of the Reference Manual.

We'd also like to thank innumerable other Fnordadel Sysops, orc, Hue, Jr., CrT and all the others who've contributed time, effort, suggestions and code to this thing we inherited.

Thanks most of all to the Coca-Cola Company, without which all of this would have been impossible. (-:

<fnord>adel files

File	Size	Date
<fnord>adel v1.33-38 source code	820,157 bytes	July, 1993