Edited by author 10-27-2003 01:14 PM
The game of firsts is such a backwards regresive endevour you realize if your in for a penny your in for a whole lot of pounding.

Zerodays folks are very much a Firsty thing. Was it going to be THG or crckrJkr who would be the first one to post up some new juarez? Of course once one did the other would just tweek it and say the first ones had it wrong ("wrong jmp code idj!0+5, we rulez!!") and put out the Real first.

Such a megilla.
 
Qwk packets may not have been the first to do aggregation but it was one of the first ones I used on a daily basis and remember as being one of the cooler apps of the bbs age. Just like RIP was begining to do thing with grpahics and BBS's QWK was the start down the road of taking things out of the box and into a new wider scope of the seeing things.

QWK was about time and space, RIP was about the visuals.

As for QWK packet archives, man that is an idea I never thought of . They are the time capsules of the BBS age. Everyone shold go hunting through old storage to see if they have any hidden treasure.

A modern day equiv of sorts, Plucker for the Palm. This is an app that can grab websites and package them up for offline reading on a Palm or other PDA. Even though I have a Tungsten C now with the wifi card I still use plucker to grab some feeds and sites for latter reading. Other toosl I use, wget and sitescooper.

-tomwsmf

I prefer Toyotas.

We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be
the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it
was once all that was humanly possible.
-- George Santayana

So while all these "firsts" are debated, and the glittering prizes disputed, like the Nobel for medicine, my worry is how primitive we are all to look from the future.

Wow, this brings back some old memories. I was there, in the thick of it. We spent hours inventing and coding, building something that "caught on". I worked with Sparky - in the pictures you can't quite see the tagline on the Sparkware logo "We upped our standards, now up yours".

Ever see a DIZ file in an archive? I created that "standard", as well as writing QNet 4.0, Qzip, SnagTag, and other mail reader / BBS utilities. We even worked out a way to route QWK packets - but the Internet came along and changed things.

We thought we were changing the world, and in a way we did. Perhaps the Internet boom might not have happened if people didn't already have the modems they bought to call our BBS systems? But today, it's all history - few people remember, even fewer care.

Think the Internet is "the last thing"? Think again...