Welcome to a new experience in Timex telecommunications.
The Indiana Sinclair Timex Users Group was formed after the 1986 Mid-West TS computer Fest. Several of the members left the Fest with a copy of T/S Tinyboard by Randy Gordon. At an early meeting one of our members stated he had an extra phone line and wanted to run Tinyboard as a service to the group.
After we got the BBs up and running he found it very difficult to keep it running. It was decided that the program needed looking at. After many examinations we decided to start over with the goals of designing a reliable and easy to operate BBs.
Tinyboard, in the form we received it, did not work for us. No reflection on Randy, we just needed and wanted more, and set out to get it. After considerable trials and errors writing the program, up-loading or Pony Expressing it to the operating location to put it to the test; we succeeded. To test this type of program you really need to use it to gain accurate information when it crashs, of which we had our share.
A STRONG “Thank You” goes to Willie Jones. He ran each change as they were made available and reported the bugs and crashes accurately. Allowing the Mad Programmer to address the problems without having actually seen them sometimes. We shared lots of frustration before this was over.
Here are the results of many hours of design, testing, rewriting, and of course, lots of debugging.
1. You do not need any expansion memory devices.
2. a real time clock, also advances the date at midnight
3. 5-40 message, message bases.
4. A quick message scan that lists the mess. no., date and time left, and the To and From names.
5. a users log, if you wish.
6. A provision allowing non-Timex callers to use the bbs. (some use a different code for NEWLINE/RETURN)
7. The callers name and date/time called, mess. no. left, mess. read, Any messages to the SYSop, and when they log off are all LPRINTED. It uses the 2040 for its ease, but any setup will do. Our SYSop has found it a great tool for managing the BBs.
8. EMAIL, send, receive, delete, all with privacy.
Since none of us had an expanded machine we used all the programming tricks we could (at least the ones I know) to allow some free memory for changes for a mass storage device and its operation. Carefull study of the program will show you that we did a lot of seemingly strange things with BASIC. There is a reason to this madness. We worked real hard to save as much memory as we could and maintain reasonable program speed. Where program speed is important we did ok. Where we wanted to control the speed or where memory saving tricks would not hurt us we did the best we could. CAUTION: Because parts of the program jump around Be REAL carefull if you start to change parts of it we do not ask you to change.