Raymond Lowe
3:700/13
D A I S Y
THE
Apple CP/M Bulletin Board System
* * *
It seems that there have recently been quite a few queries in the
net about Daisy, the Apple II BBS of which I am the author, so
for all those interested here are some details about Daisy.
Daisy who?
----------
A couple of years ago I was talking to my friend Ken Lo about
Bulletin Board Systems, and about how hard they were to write.
This was not a surprising topic of conversation as we are both
programmers, both BBS users and the conversation in question was
via messages on one of the local RBBS.
I thought that BBS were probably pretty hard to code, and were
way beyond the capabilities of the Apple ][+ which was then my
main computer (I've since moved up to a //e).
Ken disagreed, he thought it wouldn't be that hard to produce a
BBS. So after some discussion we decided to attempt the
development of what we referred to at the time as an "Apple
Fido".
We decided to use Apple CP/M and Turbo Pascal v2 for the
development as these were the most advanced systems available to
both of us.
With Ken working on the low level serial card drivers, we found
it necessary to drive the UART directly using memory mapped
registers, and me on the high level code it wasn't long before
the first Daisy was running.
You can well believe that the first call I received using Daisy
was quite a thrill for me. Even if a major bug did mean that
every character the user entered was displayed on a separate
line.
That, and many other bugs, were soon found and fixed - it wasn't
long before the very first version of Daisy was released.
Of course it was some time before anyone actually USED Daisy to
run a regular BBS. But the thrill of coding and debugging kept
us happy as we quickly developed a whole range of features for
the system.
Though it started off as a deliberate backward engineering of
Fido Daisy soon took on a life and character of its own. Today
Daisy includes many features seen in Fido, Opus and other BBS
together with quite a few features all of its own.
For Users
---------
From the point of view of a remote user the overall look-and-feel
is very much that of Opus or Fido. Most of the commands they are
already familiar with will work as they expect, and they can use
the system just fine without ever learning anything about the
Daisy specific features.
This only applies to users though; Sysops will find Daisy rather
different from what they may have seen before. As I had never
seen any BBS from the Sysop side when I started writing Daisy I
had to design everything from scratch.
For Sysops
----------
The first level of Sysop control is through a point-and-press
interface available all the time the system is waiting for
callers. This gives options such as "Start local session", "Edit
user list", "Event" and the "Terminal mode"; though not all are
available while a remote user is on-line.
During a session, be it from the local console or remotely via
modem, an on-line Sysop menu gives high-level users access to
another level of commands used to control message areas, message
renumber, access privilege levels, multiple bulletins and similar
things.
At the most detailed level all basic configuration information,
detailing which drives are to be used and so on, is controlled by
a text file which can be created using any normal text editor.
In fact all these configuration options are entirely optional, it
is perfectly possible to run the BBS by just entering 'BBS' at
the CP/M prompt and letting it run. The program automatically
generates any files it really needs.
Daisy Mailer
------------
Of course if you write a program on the basis of it being an
"Apple Fido" pretty soon people start expecting it to be able to
do FidoNet mail.
Well after quite a lot of prodding I finally got around to
starting on a mailer for Daisy. Working from the early Fidonet
Technical Standards Committee documents I built up all the code I
needed to automatically send message back and forth from Daisy to
Fido and Opus systems.
Now the Daisy Mailer is an optional extra which plugs into the
BBS and does all the packing, calling, transferring and unpacking
of messages.
It handles type two mail packets, file attaches and routing
perfectly. Echomail support is built-in and in the most recent
versions can receive ARCmail.
As Daisy is fully NetMail aware mail calls can be accepted at any
time, so it qualifies for the #CM: continuous mail flag if
correctly configured.
Ah, but...
----------
Unfortunately there is one catch if you want to use Daisy for its
FidoNet mail capability; the Mailer has not been tested by the
FTSC and hence has not been 'validated' by them as being Net
compatible.
This means that officially a Daisy BBS cannot be assigned a node
number in the nodelist.
Of course this doesn't stop you from using it as a Point system,
and I've used Daisy as a point without any problems, but if you
want a regular node number you're out of luck.
My early attempts to get the Mailer tested and validated were to
no avail; not because it was tested and failed those tests, but
rather because I could never get anyone to answer my messages
requesting that it be tested.
More recently, around the new year, I sent a full set of Daisy
and the Mailer on floppies to an Apple user in the U.S. at the
request of James Deibele who is apparently now responsible for
'foreign' mailers.
As the Apple user in question is not a CP/M user I don't expect
she'll get anywhere very fast (how soon do you think you'd be
able to get Opus running if you were not a MS-DOS user and didn't
even have a DOS bootable disk?)
So the Daisy Mailer may or may not be tested and validated Real
Soon Now.
Despite all that if you have a friendly NC, as I have, you can
probably get yourself hooked into the network for Echomail and
such.
Requirements
------------
To run Daisy you need the following:
* An Apple ][ series computer or compatible
* Z80 card and CP/M software
* Super Serial Card or compatible serial communications
device.
* External 300/1200 or 2400 baud Hayes AT compatible modem.
* Clock cards, either Time ][ or TimeMaster, are optional.
* A large capacity RAM card configured as a ramdisk is
recommended for running the BBS, it is considered essential
for running the Mailer.
* You'll also want as MUCH on-line disk storage as possible;
floppies are okay but three would be better than two.
Copyright
---------
Daisy and its associated documentation and utilities are not PD,
they are the copyrighted property of the authors.
Free use and distribution is, however, permitted - and
encouraged. The only restrictions are 1) you mustn't sell it
(make money out of distributing it), 2) distribute modified
versions without the authors permission.
Getting Daisy
-------------
The following Daisy files can be FileRequested from Electronic
BBS, 3:700/18, 2400, 23 hours a day (not during NMH).
DSY2-D.ARC 32940 02-11-89 Documents, manuals
DSY2-X.ARC 35061 07-19-88 Extra files, help
DSY2HTCS.ARC 57701 11-09-88 Daisy v2H for Time II, code
DSY2HMCS.ARC 57872 11-09-88 Daisy v2H for Timemaster //, ''
MSGUTL25.ARC 22793 01-03-89 Message utility v2.5 /w source
PACKUSR4.ARC 12326 12-28-88 Pack user list v4
MLR034.ARC 40442 02-11-89 Mailer v0.34
NODECOMP.ARC 23311 02-11-89 Nodelist compiler
SCHED0-5.ARC 13968 07-19-88 Scheduler v0.50, timed events
FILER7.ARC 28110 01-06-89 Filer sub-system
DSYST130.ARC 11131 09-04-88 Statistic program for Daisy
DSY2G-S.ARC 89663 08-22-88 Source code of Daisy V2g
The Daisy support echo, echo key DAISY, is also available from
3:700/18 or 3:700/0(Mail Gateway), it has quite a low turnover.
The Daisy support board is Daisy Information Gateway
3:700/719(700), +852-3-765-6899, 1200 baud, 24 hours. You won't
find this in your Nodelist for reasons as given above.