Pseudodel
| Original author(s) | Shadow Warrior |
|---|---|
| Written in | BASIC |
| Platform | Apple II |
Pseudodel
Remarks from CitaNews:
Pseudodel has been around Minnesota's Twin Cities for a couple of years, but isn't well-known nationwide. Here's a history written by the author of the program.
PSEUDODEL -- A SHORT HISTORY
By Shadow Warrior
Pseudodel, a derivative of Citadel for the Apple, originally started out in April of 1985 as a program that looked more like Apple-Net than Citadel. It had a menu-based structure with a very extensive "main menu" and a rather rudimentary set of board commands. In July of 1985, since the message subsystem needed some more commands for more flexibility, the basic New, Old, Forward, Reverse, and Goto commands were added, and the message section was revised to take out some of the "klunkiness". By the end of the summer, many of the basic single-key commands of Citadel were in place, although from a sysop's point of view, the system was a bit difficult to run. (For example, old messages from each room had to be removed by hand with an editing program. Each room had a separate message file, and rooms had to be created and edited by hand.) That fall, changes were made to make things easy for the sysop and aides, such as implementing a common message file that automatically deleted the oldest messages to make room for new messages. By January of 1986, the program had reached most of its present form.
At its present state, Pseudodel supports all of the single-key commands of regular Citadel except for Zforget, and many of the extended commands. However, uploading and downloading are not available because of space limitations. The sysop commands are vastly different from regular Citadel, as are some of the aide commands, but it shouldn't matter to the regular user. Because of the Apple's slow DOS, disk operations are somewhat slower than regular Citadel.
There are four current operating nodes of Pseudodel. Second City, the oldest, started on April 7th, 1985 as Splinter of the Mind's Eye BBS. It has been rather popular since that time, although most of the users come from other Twin Cities boards and not from the Citadels. Wolf's Den, the second site, started in February of 1986 with Cryo Ruggie as the sysop. It has been popular with a younger crowd and it has gained a reputation for laid-back activity and occasional ruggishness. Pavilion of Dreams went up in June of 1986 with The Saint as sysop. It went down in March of 1987, but it is now back up. Pavilion of Dreams has been a place of serious discussion and reflection of life, and one of the features is a "friends list" -- users may post their phone numbers on a list of "friends", and when they do so they can get access to the list. Aaron Propes put up a fourth node of Pseudodel, called The Monastery, in January of 1987, but the system has not been up very much because of modem problems and abusive users.
