Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 16:57:22 -0500
From: John Luce 
Subject: CopperCit, Part of the Citadel BBS Lineage

I was wandering down memory lane today and decided to see if my brush with
immortality was still intact. Much to my surprise, it was!!!

I was a long distance friend of Bob Perigo of Seattle who was running
BabeCit which was actually the CrT version tinkered with in part by other
Seattleites. Citadel spawned more variants for more platforms than any other
BBS software I know of. I don't remember how I, a denizen of Raleigh, North
Carolina came across Bob, but I did and was amazed to find out he had
graduated from North Carolina State University. Small world.

At the time, I was an Assembly language programmer (let's see.. 1990 I
believe) and was looking to find a project with which I could learn 'C'.
Bob's Radio Shack TRS Model II was going south and he wanted to port the
BabeCit to MSDOS. He is a scientist and not a programmer so I raised my hand
and did it. Not without pain, agony, and no small dose of humility for me as
I struggled with the concept of having a compiler write the machine code...
LMAO. The code turned ugly, but it ran. So much for elegant programming. A
'C' Poet I was not. But it got me the experience to get a job.

Thus CopperCit was born (my username was Coppertop because of my, at that
time, red hair). Bob still has a lightly used web version of Citadel running
on someone's home unix based system, but it has lost a lot in the
translation.

http://www.rdwarf.com/bperigo/webcit.cgi/babel

So, as I try to figure a way to learn C# and .NET so I might find another
job in my lifetime, it may very well be the venerable Citadel lineage and
CopperCit in particular will lead the way. :-)

Thanks for keeping the BBS history alive. We need more of what was a gentler
time these days and the local BBS fostered meetings with the users at a
restaurant and a pulse on the community. How I miss that!