FrontDoor

FrontDoor was one of the most popular mailers in the FidoNet-compatible networks in the 1990s acting as the physical representation of the written network node connection and mail handling standards. It was a DOS-based shareware written by Joaquim Homrighausen (alias JoHo). The FrontDoor system contained a Mailer, an Editor, a Terminal, a serial port device driver and configuration utilities.[1]

The task of mailers - the main task of original FrontDoor - was to accept a phone call for a BBS / FidoNet node system; differentiating between human and machine calls (sending the humans to the BBS while handling all other cases) and if the other end supported the same protocol started a conversation about handling whatever packets had to be exchanged, and calling external programs to handle the traffic.

Originally FrontDoor was a small utility to handle incoming calls, written in 1986. Peter Adenauer of AMS Applied Micro Systems, Inc. of Miami, Florida asked Homrighausen in 1987 to leave his job at Ericsson and to the USA and start developing a commercial product based on FrontDoor with Peter Stewart.[2] After several adventurous clashes between the programmers and the company and realising that there wasn't a useful product even after a long development the people parted: Homrighausen went to Australia with the version 1.99c source code while Stewart got the same code which has been used as the basis of InterMail software.[2]

FrontDoor continued its life as shareware as well as a commercial product; the last versions were v2.26 (DOS+OS/2 shareware) and v2.32.mL (DOS+OS/2 multiline commercial).[1]

Technical aspects

FrontDoor ran under DOS and OS/2 as well as under most DOS-based multitasking environment (like Windows). File transfer protocols supported by FrontDoor were Zmodem, Zmodem/CRC-32, Telink, SEAlink, SEAlink Overdrive, and Xmodem/CRC.

Technical specifications

FrontDoor consists of:[1]

FrontDoor features:

Hardware requirements

It is interesting to compare its system requirements[1] with today's software:

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 FrontDoor as product
  2. 2.0 2.1 Development history of FrontDoor, 1993