Inner Sanctum

Inner Sanctum

Original author(s)	John Walker (?) (aka Ganelius)
Initial release	Late 1980s
Written in	Mark Williams C
Platform	Atari ST
Child of	STadel

Inner Sanctum

Remarks from CitaNews:

Meanwhile, off in the great State of Washington, where you know it's summer because the rain is warm, a mutant ST Citadel has been spawned. Ganelius @ Inner Sanctum (US 206 *** ****) has converted STadel 3.0c from Alcyon to Mark Williams C, and begun tinkering with its innards.

The most obvious change is the grafting of Dave Betz' ADVINT adventure game interpreter onto Citadel. Betz' ADVSYS game-writing system was described in the May issue of Byte, and has been available for the ST and MS-DOS systems for more than a year. It is an object-oriented language that makes it relatively easy to write an Infocom-style text adventure game. A "compiler" crunches object and verb descriptions into a set of data structures that are interpreted by the runtime program.

An additional Citadel command (V) causes the program to execute ADVINT, with its output directed to the modem port. On our recent visit, the interpreter was running a game based (loosely) on Citadel itself.

This may be good or bad, depending on your view of BBSing in general and Citadels in particular. It certainly threatens to chew up a lot of system time, and many sysops regard on-line games as an attractive nuisance, like building a swimming pool. You never know what sort of person it's going to attract.

Ganelius also has modified the file-transfer commands so that Citadel can invoke an external program to perform the process. The external routines were provided by Tom Zerucha of Southfield, Mich., author of several programs for the ST that provide Ymodem batch, "windowed" Xmodem and Zmodem protocols, plus a kamikaze Xmodem variant that sends an "ack" in advance to speed up transfers on packet networks. Because of the number of options, downloading on Ganelius' system is menu-driven rather than command-driven.

The software currently is labeled Inner Sanctum, a switch made after it was discovered that the name Pseudodel was already taken.

I think that I'm remembering the Ganelius's real name correctly. However, the founder of Autodesk is named John Walker, so perhaps I'm getting the two confused. Whatever his name is, he deserves special mention as the first person to expose me to PGP, some time around 1992. He had moved to the PC world and was running a Gremlin's Citadel at the time.

Inner Sanctum Files

File	Size	Date
Inner Sanctum Version 1.75	136,196 bytes
Inner Sanctum Version 1.75 Readme File	37,218 bytes