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Dubner International, Inc.13 Westervelt Place |
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TapUBB general information: If you have found your way here, it is most likely because you are interested in what's going on with the TapUBB interface program. For 23 years or so, AVSIG was hosted on Compuserve, and a whole raft of third party programs (called Off-Line-Readers, or OLRs) were created to augment the original Teletype-based interface. I used TAPCIS, a DOS program originally created by Howard Benner expressly to cut down on connect-time charges back when Compuserve was charging $12/hour for 1200 baud connections. (Lordy. Hand hand me my walker. One penny got you 360 bytes. What a business model! Just this morning I got a 12 megabyte e-mail; Compuserve would've charged me $333 for that. Of course, it would have taken 28 hours to download, so maybe they had a point.) In May of 2004 AVSIG was removed from Compuserve by its owner, the Aviation Safety Institute, and it is now being hosted on a Web view Universal Bulletin Board system server. UBB is a perfectly good Web view. I hate Web views. So, I wrote a new communications module for the TAPCIS system, one that knows how to talk to the Web view. It downloads messages down from the UBB board and puts them into the TAPCIS message format; it takes the TAPCIS-created uploads and pushes them up into the UBB view. TAPCIS is a DOS program. It is funny-looking; it is quirky, you have to learn and memorize a whole bunch of oddball keystroke combinations that are loosely based on the DOS WordPerfect 5.0 program. People who came to computers in the Post-DOS Windows age tend to dislike it intensely. It is, however, fast, and that's why we TAPCIS lovers love TAPCIS. Messages get downloaded to your machine while you do something else, and then you can review them as fast as you can read them. Once you get used to it it, the "click-and-wait" paradigm of the Web view becomes intolerable. Although it is conceivable that TapUBB will work on other UBB message boards, the success of TapUBB is dependent on the UBB board's configuration. As of this writing, it is known to work only on AVSIG. Feel free to contact me; my e-mail address is below. June 1, 2004 Questions, comments, problems, complaints and kudos: They all go to the same place: me
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