     Synchronet BBS Software: Ancient Source Archive, created Oct-19-2020
                                                  and updated Dec-25-2020
     ====================================================================
  Includes files from Aug-1991 (SBBS v1a00) through early 1995 (SBBS v2.10a)

You're interested in the early days of Synchronet BBS source code? Uh. Okay.

Most of the files in this archive are C source code of Synchronet BBS Software
which was copyright (and sold commercially) by Digital Dynamics back in the
early 1990s. Eventually I released a version of the source code to the public
domain in 1996. Later, the project became a full-fledged open source project
with v3.

But just to be clear, the Digital Dynamics copyrights on the included material
have been released: you are free to do what you like with the code.

So Synchronet was NOT originally open source. I probably gave the source to a
few close sysop-friends and sold one or two commercial licenses to the source,
but mostly, it was a proprietary thing that had a lot of value to me at the
time (it was a primary element in my only source of income for a few years),
but I hadn't been a programmer all that long and frankly, the quality of BBS
software back in that day was pretty poor, in general. So, don't expect any
great quality by today's standards.

I backed-up the source code fairly often, if not regularly, and I had been
burned by faulty tape back-ups already by this time, so I used floppy disks.
I would zip-up directories of what I perceived to be the most important or
recently-changed projects until I got close to 1.44MB (the capacity of a
DS-HD disk formatted for MS-DOS) and then copy the files, label the disk(s),
and get back to work or go to bed, finally (you might notice that most of the
time stamps on the files are in the late evening or early morning hours).

I think I did a good job of not losing any disks (not positive), though I
never transferred them to CD-Rs or flash drives or any other more modern or
reliable media... until now. Why now? Someone was trying to get SBBS version
1a to work and needed a missing file and I told him I'd look and see what I
had backed-up. I didn't do a very good job of keeping copies of the original
install disks, but I do have a lot of source code and BBS data backups. I
figured 25+ years was long enough to expect those floppies to be good and I
should see what's on the disks.

So I took the bag of 30 or 40 dusty floppy disks that were labeled with
something related to Synchronet and went through them trying to read them
on a modern Windows 10 system using a USB floppy disk drive. I'd estimate
that probably 90% of the files were readable, though it was slow going.
Really... Slow... Going. And some of the disks were actually DS-DD disks that
I had formatted as DS-HD, so I had a drill a few holes in some disks. One
trick of the day was to route the turbo switch of your PC case to the
"HD" hole sensor of the floppy drive, so you could control the density of
the disk without needing to burn/punch/drill any holes in your disks.
Needless to say, the USB drives today don't include that "feature".

I have already put some of the recovered SBBS install disks on Vertrauen
in the Synchronet Archive directory, ftp://vert.synchro.net/main/sbbs_arc,
but now here are the source files (mostly C, but some assembler). I included
some of the object files that I may not have had the source to (stuff I
contracted Steve Deppe (RIP) to write, or he donated).

I made no attempt to recompile or link the files. You're pretty much on your
own if you want to attempt that.

The registration/protection stuff is all still in place in the source, so
you would need to either build it as a registered copy (for the oldest
versions) or have a SBBS.KEY file for the newer versions, or just modify the
source to remove all those limitations and protections. But if you're really
going to build any old MS-DOS or OS/2 version of Synchronet, it should be
the latest (v2.30b), not this stuff. This is more just for historical
curiosity. There are also the very beginnings of long-lived projects like
Baja (PCMS), SEXYZ (STP/SFTP), and some games that were never finished. The
source to a lot of ad-hoc upgrade/conversion utilities is included too.

Included in this archive are some BBS run-time files, like text/menu files,
text.dat files, documentation, etc. Not every file you would need to run
the BBS is likely here (there are other archives with that stuff available),
but there's definitely more than just source code here. There are some
files from my running BBS (Vertrauen) at the time, but I did attempt to clean
out any sensitive data (user database, registration numbers, etc.). If you
do find any sensitive information in the files included here, it was
unintentional and I'd appreciate you bringing it to my attention.

  Enjoy!

Rob Swindell

P.S. A few days after making the original ssrc199x.zip archive in October,
I located some floppy disks of Steve Deppe's (RIP). Steve performed all the
assembler programming for Synchronet v1 and v2 and I did not have all the ASM
source files in my backups, so I went through his 3.5" floppies and did not
find much, but his labeled 5.25" floppies looked promising. So I sent those
5.25" disks off to a floppy transfer company (floppydisk.com) and they were
able to successfully restore 11 of the 12 disks. One file on one disk needed
a PKZIP password hack, but that was pretty easy using today's tools and
processing power. Among those disks were old Synchronet assembler and C
source archives; one of the C source archives was several months older than
the oldest v1a source backup that I had! So now, we likely have the complete
picture of all the Synchronet source code through the early '90s, both 8086/88
assembler and C.