Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 14:47:20 -0500
From: Mike Jacobs 

I just discovered your site and the documentary (will be watching it soon.)
I came across your list of BBS software and was quite surprised and pleased
to see Socrates listed.  I wrote Socrates, and as far as I know, it never
had more than 3 sites using it (my own being one of them.)

I originally ran a Fido BBS while I was in high-school and early college in
northern Delaware, around 1985.

I was also a user of this obscure mainframe system that a number of
universities used called Plato, which in and of itself was full of
innovations (the first MMRPG systems ran on it using simple line-art, back
in the late 70's, etc.)  one feature it has was a notes system that, unlike
typical BBS boards, was threaded: main notes linked to responses.  so, being
a computer nerd, I used Turbo Pascal on my PCjr, and built a system that
would read in the messages (Fido formatted), parse the subjects and build an
index of them in threads, and then I used a message reader I wrote to read
messages in this fashion.

Then, I took a compiler design course, and this inspired me.  so I whipped
out the Turbo Pascal again, and built a totally customizable BBS system: all
menus were scripted, each line could be linked to conditional triggers that
could be full boolean expressions based on internal system values and
assigned user privileges.

so, wrap up the threaded messages, the programmable menu BBS, and
BinkleyTerm for FidoNet connection, and you had Socrates.  (Named such
because I incorrectly thought Plato was Socrates' teacher.  I later found
out the correct order of Greek philosophers, but it was too late.)  It was,
of course, way to complex for anyone to practically use...

I was FidoNet node 150:900, then 150:199 after a re-org of net 150.

and if you're digging around obscure FidoNet stuff, I was admin of the SFFAN
echomail group, and I was also the author of RushMail, a system of modifying
one's Fido events to speed up moving EchoMail around a topology.  (I even
have a copy of the 1987 FidoNews where it was published!)