25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer

When dial-up BBSes were still all the rage, I used to have an elaborate set of self-made ARexx (and other) scripts to facilitate offline messaging.

We had metered calls here. If you were a regular caller to various boards you could only keep your phone bills in check by using scripts and offline readers, instead of using the BBS software as it is usually meant to be used - for reading and writing messages online. (This wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Offline reading and message writing was usually more convenient than the same actions online, since you could use your favorite text editor, take all the time in the world to read the new messages, didn't keep the phone line busy, could more easily archive interesting messages, etc.)

I had a fully automated setup where I only needed to select the boards to call from the phone book of a terminal program, go away for a coffee (or whatever), and come back a little bit later to find the Amiga offline and new messages loaded in a message reader. Scripts would handle logon, uploading my reply packet, downloading new messages, checking the file areas for a list of recently uploaded new files, logout, unpacking the new message packet, and, finally, loading it into an offline reader.

-- znark