With all the rage about RSS/Atom and aggregators and podcasting and blah blah blah. I thought I would take a moment to mention that this is yet another technology that was born in the era of the almighty BBS (Bulletin Board System).
Those of you that know me personally, know that I was a long time SysOp of many BBSes over the years starting out when I was about 15. So every now and then I feel nostalgic and start thinking back to the ways that the innovation around BBSes is what did them in with the internet.
For example, RSS is pretty simple, right? You’ve got an application that goes around pulling down XML feeds from various web sites and when new items are detected they are shown to you as new headlines and at this point they are completely in your control. You are not connected to the web site while you are reading the document.
Aside from the fact that RSS has been around for many many years on the internet (anybody remember iSyndicate?), this idea was pioneered by the geniuses at Clark Development, the company that made PCBoard, one of the best BBS software systems for DOS Mark Herring of Sparkware and it found itself quickly integrated into a number of different BBS software systems. The technology back then was called QWK.
Basically, you would configure your full featured terminal software to automatically log into your favorite BBSes and issue automated commands (think of them as HTTP GET requests) for the QWK packets that you subscribed to. The BBS would grab all of the messages and bulletins posted since your last download and ZIP them into a file with a predictable structure. The QWK reader, then acts in much of the same way that your RSS reader does. Some QWK readers even supported writing offline replies and new messages which would be uploaded on the next round. Similar to blogging APIs that let RSS readers act as blog posters as well.
Anyway there’s tons more. Soon I’ll go on my rant about why the single most useful feature of BBSes (message networks) have no parallel today in the various message forums on the internet.
I wish I had more time. I really would love to develop the BBS of the 21st century.
(Thanks to Jason Scott who corrected my recollection of the QWK origin…)