Blue Wave
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- This article is about an offline mail reader. For the Japanese baseball team, please see Orix Blue Wave.
Blue Wave, often incorrectly spaced as BlueWave, is a file-based offline mail reader that was popular among bulletin board system users, especially users of FidoNet and other networks that generated large volumes of mail. The name "Blue Wave" refers to both the software reader program and the format of the mail packets, as other offline mail readers have been written that support the Blue Wave format.
Blue Wave was originally written in 1990 by George Hatchew, and marketed via his company, Cutting Edge Computing. It is not clear if Hatchew was aware of the similar QWK format when he wrote Blue Wave. QWK had been introduced in 1987, but did not gain a wide following until much later. Blue Wave became fairly popular in the early 1990s, as at the time QWK was generally limited to PCBoard systems, on which it was based. However, new QWK "doors" for other popular BBS systems soon appeared and its popularity grew considerably. Hatchew then adapted the Blue Wave client software to allow it to read and write QWK as well as Blue Wave files. Hatchew was later involved in a serious car accident, and was unable to continue development of the system past 1993. Blue Wave soon disappeared from the BBS scene, replaced by a wave of QWK-based readers.
Like QWK, Blue Wave message files consisted of a selection of seemingly randomly named files. Messages themselves were stored in the main .DAT file, supported by an information file and a file containing the headers for each message, and a pointer to the body in the DAT.
Blue Wave packet format has also been supported by other offline mail readers such as BlueMail, MultiMail and Wolverine.
