Synchronet
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Synchronet is a multiplatform BBS software package, with current ports for Microsoft Windows, Linux, and BSD variants . Past versions also ran on MS-DOS and OS/2, but support for those platforms has been dropped in recent versions.
[edit] History
Synchronet was originally written by Rob Swindell (a.k.a. Digital Man) due to his dissatisfaction with the lack of certain features in WWIV, such as support for multiple simultaneous nodes, batch uploads and bidirectional file transfer. The bulk of the programming for the first version of Synchronet was done during a two-month period in 1991 when Swindell was house-ridden while he recovered from surgery. The software was named for its ability to run synchronously on a network.
In July 1991 the author began running his own BBS, Vertrauen, on Synchronet. Initially, he had no intention of releasing Synchronet publicly, but as word of his software spread and he received offers to buy copies of Synchronet, he eventually relented, formed a company called Digital Dynamics, and sold copies of Synchronet at a price of $100 without source code, and $200 with source code. In April 1992, Swindell's employer went out of business and he began to rely exclusively on commercial sales of Synchronet for his livelihood, placing advertisements in the BBS-related magazines Boardwatch and BBS Callers Digest. The first copy of Synchronet sold through the magazine ads was in June 1992.
Synchronet was the first BBS package to support QWK message networking natively without requiring any external utilities, in version 1a revision 10, released June 25, 1992. It was also the first BBS package with RIP support, in version 1b revision 1, released January 23, 1993.
Interest in Synchronet began to dwindle in late 1994, finally becoming nonexistent in 1995. Digital Dynamics went effectively bankrupt in the fall of 1995. Despite this, a beta version of version 2.30 of Synchronet for MS-DOS and an alpha version for OS/2 were released in early 1996. In August 1996, Swindell announced the uncertainty of Synchronet's future. In 1997, version 2.30 of Synchronet was released as freeware, and the source code was released into the public domain later that year.
In April 1999, Swindell revived Synchronet development, revamping it considerably and converting much of the code to C++. Another version, 2.30c, was released in December 1999, fixing Y2K bugs and introducing some minor new features from the upcoming 3.x series. Version 3.00b was released June 25, 2000 and was the first official release of the 3.x series, featuring a native 32-bit Windows version and many new Internet-related features, such as a built-in telnet server. For this release, dial-up support was dropped making it a TCP/IP-only system. In October 2000, Synchronet was released under the GNU General Public License.
Since then, a light cross-platform development kit and a reimplementation of Borlands conio library which uses the Windows console, ncurses, SDL, X11, and ANSI for output have been developed and the code now compiles and runs on FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Linux (on x86 systems only). Vertrauen includes a Linux box in its setup.
Since release 3.10a, Synchronet has included an embedded JavaScript engine using the SpiderMonkey project from Mozilla. More internet servers have been added including finger, gopher, IRC, SMTP, POP3, NNTP, and HTTP.
[edit] Current Development
Synchronet is under fairly constant improvement, and is currently moving towards a final release in the 3.x series. After a stable release of 3.x, development will begin to focus on a new 4.x series with an eye towards removing legacy limitations on the system. Big endian support is mostly completed (but not currently in CVS) and was originally started to support Mac OS X. Since Apple has moved to Intel processors, this is a less pressing goal. However, as one of the developers now owns a number of SPARC systems, 4.x is expected to run on (at least) Solaris/SPARC, Linux/SPARC, and FreeBSD/SPARC. As these systems have used 64-bit support in differing manners, this is also expected to help with porting to the ia64 and AMD64 architectures. However, as of Aug 2nd 2006, no-one has began an ia64/AMD64 porting effort.
Version 3.14 was released on December 31, 2006. New features included SSH support, UART emulation, and various Web / Mail Server improvements. [1]
