TRS-80 - Zeta BBS

My Zeta BBS evolved through many iterations. I started writing code (in BASIC!) in December 1984. After a while I rewrote everything in Assembler (and even later, in C). The official birthdate of Zeta BBS was 1st February, 1985.

Zeta started from the most humble beginnings. I had bought a 300 bps modem around September 1984, so I could dial into BBSs and the University modems just like my friend Mark McDougall, who was in the same course and year as me. But the modem wasn't the beginning - Zeta's germination started with something even smaller - a single red LED.

The LED was attached to a circuit called "visual ring detect". The circuit came from one of the hobbyist magazines. The idea was to connect the circuit to a telephone line and the LED would flash when the telephone rang. Of course this was illegal because the device was not TELECOM-approved, so the magazine published the circuit but labelled it for private telephone use only.

Anyway my reasoning was as follows: If a telephone ring signal (a nasty jumble of 50 volt AC pulses) could be reduced to light in a single LED, then the LED could be replaced by an opto-coupler (which is basically a LED and a photo-detector inside a chip) and the detector could be coupled to the computer, which would be able to tell when the phone was ringing. Knowing when the phone was ringing, the computer could then flip a relay which would connect the (approved) modem to the telephone circuit. The modem being in ANSWER mode would start to talk to the other party's modem and there would be a connected data circuit!

This was in the days before auto-answer modems existed, before Hayes brought out the famous AT command set (the source of so much modem trouble over the years). At least I did not have access to any fancy gear, I only had a very crappy Dick Smith Dataphone modem and a ring-detect circuit...

So I wired up the computer as described above. I managed to blow up a few opto-couplers and also the computer's cassette relay as I've always been hopeless at analogue electronics, but eventually I got something which sorta worked.

I setup the gear on my parents' telephone, which was also a business line, between the hours of 11pm and 7am daily. Many people called outside those times and my mother got quite used to hearing the persistent whine of a 300 baud modem at the other end. Zeta BBS was born!

And to cut a long story short, Zeta was a free service for a while as I experimented and wrote more software for it. I hooked it up to Fidonet, joining the first group of Fidonet users in Australia (net was run by a chap called Brian Gatenby) and I wrote a gateway between Fidonet and ACSNet which ran between my computer and a minicomputer at NSWIT and Larry Lewis' Prophet BBS. It was called ACSGate.

Here are a bunch of packages which contain a fairly complete picture of the source code for the Zeta BBS. Nothing has been tested.

This package contains some programs to maintain the online files catalog. The BBS was floppy based (3 x 80 track double sided, double density) and so sometimes files were "available" but not "online".

fixwhere

This program "builds and maintains file catalogues".

fmerge

This C program "merges CATALOG/NEW and FILELIST/ZMS into CATALOG/UPD with unknowns filed in CATALOG/UNK".

rearr

This C program rearranges the CATALOG/ZMS format to put the filenames at the start of each line.

volume

This program determines if a particular volume (diskette) is mounted.

I tried to gather low level communications routines and some protocols into this package.

acsnet

Protocol handler for ACSnet news and email. I don't know what protocol this program was implementing, but from the code it looks complete.

answer

This program took care of the initial modem handshake and invocation of Fidonet protocol call reception too. No messing with Ring Indicate here, this program was used when I got an auto-answer modem.

carrier

This resident program monitored the carrier signal at all times.

devices

This resident program sets up and implements all the special devices.

dialout

This program dials out and initiates Fidonet protocol transfers.

fcp

This program performs the Fidotalk connection protocol.

ftalk

This program sends a mail "packet" (and file attaches). There's also "ftalk2" which combines the functions of ftalk and getpkt.

getpkt

This program receives a Fidonet "packet".

This package contains some file transfer programs which I used within and maybe outside the Zeta BBS environment.

capture

This is a non-protocol upload program (ASCII data capture).

xfer

This program provides a menu for file transfers.

xmodem

There are various incarnations of Xmodem transfer programs in this directory.

At one time I had the original Adventure running on Zeta. I believe that it required a reboot to get back to the BBS though. Later I got Zork running ... by disassembling the infocom executor, massaging it into a source code format, and then reassembling the source code to live within the Zeta BBS environment.

This package contains my work on the Zork 1 executor. It's modified Infocom code, but I don't think Infocom are around to care any more. Anyway, there are free Infocom executors around, so it's not as if you need this code. I'm just showing it here for research purposes, as the work that I did on it. Please note that the Zork 1 datafile is not included in this package.

zork

Massaged Z-machine executor including Zeta BBS patch to make the lamp flicker and go out after 30 moves (only cripples non-members).

This package contains some files which manipulate my 256 Kbyte RAM modification and/or stay resident in high memory.

errlog

This program hooks into DOS errors (how?) and logs certain errors (such as permission denied) to the LOG_MSG device.

ptrlog

This program logs all output from LOG_MSG to disk.

real

This program uses my Real Time Clock circuit.

special

This program sets up the Zeta BBS environment (event hooks and global variables in high memory area, for example).

This package contains the standard assembly include files which were required to compile almost anything for the Zeta BBS environment.

bb7func.asm

Treeboard message-base file I/O functions.

bbopen.asm

A file open function which checks privileges first.

chksysop.asm

Check if we are running as the sysop.

fidonet.asm

Our identity within Fidonet (and peer identities).

fortyhex.asm

Message output function.

getuname.asm

Function to return the current user name.

libcz.asm

Variant of the Small C Standard I/O library for Zeta environment.

linein.asm

A sophisticated line input routine.

morepipe.asm

Pagination and word wrap routine.

msghdr.asm

Format of the MSGHDR.ZMS file.

msgtop.asm

Format of the MSGTOP.ZMS file.

program-template.asm

A template for assembling a C program for execution in the Zeta environment.

routines.asm

A bunch of common routines.

rs232.asm

Definitions for my RS-232 interface.

stats.asm

Format of the STATS.ZMS file (keeps caller counts, etc).

stddev.asm

Routines for standard device usage.

system.asm

Provides the system(cmd) call for Small C programs.

times.asm

Some routines for time handling.

userfile.asm

Format of one USERFILE entry.

userfunc.asm

uopen(), uclose() and others. Possibly was not used.

This package contains some "internal" programs - things which the system ran without the user's knowledge.

cron

Like the Unix utility, "cron" executes commands at certain times and at certain intervals. Unlike Unix, it didn't run as a daemon and so it updated its control file with "next execute" datestamps. I have provided a sample crontab.

exitsys

This program runs each time a user logs out.

logon

This program accepts a user's name and password and starts their preshell.

preshell

This program executes some commands for the user who has just logged in.

setup

This program prepares the computer for use as a remote system.

swapper

This program uses my 256 Kbyte memory subsystem to allow multiple programs to be resident in memory concurrently (although not to execute concurrently). A program can call another program, and the older program will be transparently "swapped" into inaccessible physical memory, while fresh memory pages will become available for the newer program. When the newer program exited, its pages would be freed and the pages belonging to the older program would be replaced at their physical locations, and the older program would resume executing from where it left off. It was quite a lovely system.

This package contains everything related to the Zeta BBS private message system (including email).

mail-command

This directory contains the source to the end-user mail application

mail-in-c

This directory contains a C language reimplementation of the Zeta Mail system. I don't know if the program is complete.

msgdel

This program deletes mail messages older than a certain date.

adduser

Add a new user to the user file or give a person member status.

credit

Alter a person's credit. In the latter years of the lifetime of the Zeta BBS I ran it as an optional-payment system. $1 per month.

deluser

Delete a user or lock out the user.

junklog

Delete unwanted lines from the system logfile.

logclean

Truncate from the front of the (to be?) printed log.

printlog

Print the log file, but only complete pages.

ulist

List the contents of the user file.

usrclean

Delete inactive non-members.

This package contains a bunch of programs which contributed to the Zeta BBS exchanging messages with the Fidonet and ACSNet networks.

ankhmail

Process all incoming files from other network nodes, including email, message bundles, Fidonews, USENET News files and Nodediffs. Name is a pun on "arcmail".

cpnews

"Copies an ACSnet file into NEWSTXT".

fidonet

This directory contains a compendium of programs which I have previously released as "fidonet-packet-handlers". There are programs here to scan the message bases for messages which need to be sent elsewhere, which reformat them into transport files of various formats, and do the reverse actions, unpacking files which we have received from other nodes and inserting the messages into the MAIL or BB message bases. And much more!

pkthack

Split a big packet into smaller packets. "packet" was the Fidonet terminology for a collection of messages wrapped up in a binary file of the appropriate format. Not an IP packet!

pktlook

Check out what's inside a packet.

uechoarc

"A filter for echoarc messages". I'm afraid I don't know what that means now.

The Treeboard was the jewel in the crown of Zeta BBS. It was a public message board, as all BBSs needed, but with a difference. It used a tree hierarchy of topics and users could create their own topics. Like the "room" idea of the Citadel BBS, which came well before Zeta, but a little more nerdy as a person who didn't like, say, sports, could skip sports at the top level and that would avoid all sporting-type discussions.

The topics were organised as a tree. In the first incarnation I used a single 8-bit byte for each topic code, organised bitwise as AAABBBCC, where AAA represents the major category of the tree: 00100000 was a top-level category, 00100100 was a second-level category under that, and 00100101 was a third-level category. You can see that the system is limited to 7 top-level categories, 7 x 7 mid-level categories, and 7 x 7 x 3 third-level categories, for a grand total of 203 if the tree was filled evenly. In the second incarnation I realised that keeping the hierarchy information in the topic code byte itself was inefficient and so I made that a simple integer (extending the range of the system to 255 total categories) and made some other arrangement to store the category structure.

Treeboard, or BB as it was called on the system, also had quite an advanced user input routine. One could use line commands (pressing enter after each line) or one could press the key while the menu was being output, and cancel the menu and jump straight to the requested function. One could also string commands together in line-input mode, by separating them with semicolons.

bb

This directory contains the treeboard source code and HELP file.

bb-a86

This is an 8086 port of the treeboard which I wrote for the NSW Disadvantaged Schools Project BBS. It was a straight port, in other words I read the original code and rewrote that in 8086 line by line, and I added some glue functions to tie it to the operating system (which was MP/M-86). The program worked fine.

bbarch

This program archives the oldest messages on the tree. Due to the Zeta BBS having only floppy disks the message base was limited to some maximum size. I think architecturally it was limited to 512 Kbytes, and so it was necessary to regularly free up some space. I think maybe I implemented a circular buffer after a while so that new messages would simply wipe out the oldest ones.

bbsquash

This program "squashes" treeboard messages. Obviously this came before the circular buffer mentioned above.

msgcomp

This program "compresses message system in-place". Not sure if it relates to the mail or bb system or both.

msgconv

This program converts message files from the old to the new format. This might represent the transition point to the circular buffer.

This package contains commands which end-users were expected to use. As a budding Unix-phile I was keen on seeing things happen through the command line (or the shell I started to write) and so I resisted providing a menu-driven system for a long, long time. Even when I put my SunOS box online, users were mostly in the bash shell.

ask

Ask a yes/no question.

bye

Request logout from the system.

cat

Concatenate files, like Unix.

chat

Every BBS needs one ... a little program to chat to the Sysop (who naturally spends much time hovering around his BBS to just make sure that it is still running and keep an eye on what's going on in case some Skr!pt |<idd13 is trying to 0wn his box).

cmds

Lists all .CMD files on drive zero.

comment

Leave a user comment for the Sysop to read. Strangely enough most Sysops craved attention from their users and so there was the interactive chat, special "message to sysop" options and of course the obligatory "leave a comment" at the end of the call.

cp

Copy files (I think usage of this command was limited to the Sysop).

cwiz

It prints a random wise saying. This program was written by Ross McKay, and I don't think he will mind it appearing here. Ross is also the author of the "Portable GUI Development Kits FAQ" which is archived on www.faqs.org.

date

Print current date and time.

dir

Print a diskette directory.

dirall

Print directory of all disk drives.

direct

My "DIRECT" utility, which appears and is well documented in another of my TRS-80 packages (maybe trs80-file-utils).

echo

Echoes its command line input.

edit

A simple editor. I think even end-users were allowed to use this. This looks like it is adapted from the TRS-80 Lisp system.

free

Find out how much free disk space there is.

grep

Search for a string of characters in a text file.

help

Displays documentation for commands and other topics, and provides a simple pagination and manner of navigation.

id

Shows the current user number and user name.

kill

Deletes a file. End-users were only allowed to modify one file which was called TEMPFILE. So the kill command would permit end-users to delete TEMPFILE.

list

Output the contents of a text file.

logout

Logout from the system.

lprint

Print timestamp and a message on the printer. This program was used very early on - last modified 1986-07-06 - and was probably replaced by LOG/ZMS which accumulated all log output and sometime later a utility would print a page of that file at a time. I probably got sick of hearing my line printer chirp at random intervals during every night, so I arranged to save paper and get it all done quickly by buffering the log output and flushing the buffer when I felt like it.

ls

Output a directory listing.

me

Message entry for the Treeboard.

menu

Provide a menu for people who found all those commands were just intimidating.

more

Output the contents of a text file, with pagination.

note

Send and receive short notes.

pack

The Unix "pack" command, reimplemented in assembler.

password

Let a user change their password.

readnews-in-c

A Small C program to act as a newsreader. It is probably unfinished.

rm

Remove files, analogous to "kill".

scrub

Clear bit 7 from file contents and convert text files from CP/M (now DOS) to TRS-80 format.

shell

A user shell which is re-entrant and can execute simple batch files.

sort

A file sorter. This one looks like it uses the bubble sort algorithm too (sigh).

stty

A quite impressive version of stty. Many options, but some probably did nothing. The user can change their terminal width and length, at least!

survey

Ask some questions of the user (there's that Sysop craving interaction again).

userlist

List members and non-members.

wisdom

Analogous to "cwiz", again a program by Ross McKay.