Citadel
| Original author(s) | Jeff Prothero (aka Cynbe ru Taren) |
|---|---|
| Initial release | December 1981 |
| Discontinued | 2.40 (?) / 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 |
