From: winston@merk.com (Winston Smith)
Subject: Re: Qwk Readers
Keywords: QWK, IBM, BBS, offline, mailer, ASCII, textpro
Organization: Technology Partners, Inc.
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 13:26:31 GMT


The purpose of ".QWK" message readers are to capture a message base.  Well,
that is not entirely true.  A ".QWK" packet is the product of an offline
mailer on IBM bulletin boards called Qwik-Mail.  Normally, if you wanted to
grab an entire message base, you would have to do a "continuous display" of
messages while in a message area.  The only problem with this is that it
is a waste of bandwidth to only send a single character per byte, as any
user of SUPER-ARC will tell you.  Why not capture the message area in a
pre-compressed state?  The length of your long distance telephone call will
be shorter, as you will be sending multiple characters per byte.  About the
time that this idea was running around IBM boards, PC-BOARD host software
got the idea of archiving all of the mail in a particular conference /
message base, and allowing you to download the entire message base as an
.ARC file.  Then, someone asked themselves, "Why bother logging onto the
BBS and dancing through all of those logon / welcome bulletins, menus, and
message area changes?  Why not have all of that overhead archived and
stuffed into the offline mailer packet so you don't have to waste all of
this time moving back and forth from one area to another, from one menu to
another?  Ta-Da!  We now have the modern IBM offline mail reader.
Essentially, everything is stuffed into a mailer packet archive and fed to
you without you having to waltz around online.  You can do all of your
reading offline, at your own leisure.  The funny thing about it was that
this major "breakthrough development" of the offline message reader that
was put into practice on IBM BBSes in the 1990's had been in use for years
on CP/M BBSes such as CITADEL before the first IBM had even rolled off of
the assembly line!  It only took IBM people a decade to discover this "new"
concept!
  
     QWK-Mail offline message readers are mainly used to retrieve mail
packets off of IBM BBS systems that carry the FidoNET "Atari" National
Echomail Message Base (as opposed to the "Atari ST" Echomail Base).  Such
systems are: PCBOARD, MAXIMUS, OPUS, TBBS, possibly TELEGARD (if the
Blue-Wave offline message reader is ".QWK" compatible.  I don't
remember...), FIDO v12.  There are ".QWK" offline message readers for many
IBM BBS hosts.
 
     I have failed to get either PABQWK or QWK-SILVER to work on my stock
ATARI 800XL yet (I'm not sure that it is even possible), but when playing
with QWK-Silver I made an interesting discovery, namely the ".QWK" message
structure for the database appears to be an --ASCII-- format...  with
high-ASCII characters used as special characters and delimeters.  Thus, it
should be entirely possible to write a ".QWK" message packet reader using
TEXTPRO macros, for example!  Of course, the real trick would be in being
able to create a "reply" packet via TEXTPRO that a QWK-Mailer would accept
as a valid format.  I don't think it would be difficult if anyone wanted to
try it.  The ".QWK" message structure looks fairly straightforward.  The
QWK-SILVER doc.s come with a description of the QWK message packet
structure.  If anyone has a stock ATARI 800XL and is running QWK-SILVER
successfully, please post your configuration information so that I can try
and duplicate your setup.  Thank you.
 

Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.8bit