GIGO Announcement
It is with a heavy heart that I make this announcement.
Recently, as some of you know, I made the change from OS/2 to Unix. It was mandated for stability - the OS/2 box just could not manage to stay up longer than a day at a time. I’ve since installed unix, and it stays up for days, weeks at a time (it reached one month, before I wanted to install a new kernel which required a reboot). Some progress at porting GIGO to unix was made, but there are byte ordering problems that take a significant amount of time to debug - not to mention, there is very very poor support for fidonet at all under unix.
Meanwhile, I had two recent copies of GIGO - one, on the win95 hard drive, the other, on zip disk media. The zip disks got used to transport files around (a few hundred megs worth from work to home), with the intention that I would make a new backup of the win95 system (it needed it anyways) back onto the zip disk media once I was done transporting. Unfortunately, the win95 hard drive chose the absolute worst time to decide to crap out. Efforts to revive it have failed, and I can not afford to spend the couple thousand dollars to retrieve what was on it.
The most recent copy of GIGO I have, was the CD burn I had made back in August of 96. :( I was severely afraid that I wouldn’t find _that_ copy - in which case, my prior CD burn was back in _April_. All is not lost, but a good number of hours were, by having to revert all the way back to August.
With an even heavier heart, is the knowledge that I have had almost zero time for my hobbies. As only the locals know, my current job is _very_ demanding. I am the head of system administration for a local ISP, with all of it’s aspects - the “cgi guy”, postmaster, security, network administration, etc. I’ve got one jr admin below me, who’s great at putting out fires, setting up routers, etc - but unable to do some of the more complex programming stuff. Even as such, we’re under staffed by about 20 hours a week - not enough hours to hire someone as nobody can afford a half a job :-(.
All of my home activities have been severely limited - mostly, answering email, and working on work projects from home, occasionally reminding myself that I even have a family here. GIGO’s had very slow development over the last year, especially compared to previous years; bug report handling has been pitiful; and the local fido people are probably considering replacing me as a fidonet hub because I only read my fidonet netmail every couple of weeks. I wish I could do better, but there are only 24 hours in a day.
As such, I am releasing the source codeto GIGO. I hope that others can port it to more modern compilers (I used Watcom 10.0 - if there is a *SERIOUS* interest from a person out there in also using Watcom as well as the 32bit DOS extender I purchased, let me know - mine is collecting dust). I hope that some life can be breathed back into it. I will be releasing the sources to GIGO once I can separate them out from the rest of my backups. Please remember: the code base will be from 09/96..
Should there be any substantial interests in various off shoots from the original GIGO, I’ll gladly host a mailing list here or set up mail forwarding aliases at the gigo.com domain. I however, will not be turning the domain name over - I use the domain name much as others use a PO box - as a permanent address for myself and a large number of family members. In addition, the locals who use the 1:203/2 internet gateway all depend on the domain name as well. [I intend to shut down 1:203/2 as well as any other fidonet activity 1/1/98 unless I somehow change jobs and reclaim a LOT of free time]
I have made a [http://www.gigo.com/../index.html web page CGI form ]that will generate keys for key number “9999”. It is an unpaid, unregistered key; it does not signify any status other than that I acknowledge that my own abilities have been reached in GIGO development. Visit the web page if you need a key; it will remove the splash screen at the end, as well as continue to allow it to run beyond the expiration date. PLEASE USE THE WEB PAGE AT [http://www.gigo.com/../index.html WWW.GIGO.COM] - email requests, will be “when I get around to it”, and I don’t always remember low priority email so well :-( [most of my email is actually answered from *work* not home].
In closing, I’d like to thank those who have supported me - via registrations (hey, they kept the wife happy while they were paying for my costs), via code and advice (Especially, David Nugent, who is rumored to also consider leaving Fidonet due to fido politics, and to Burt Juda, who for a long time with IEEE’s financial assistance, ran the default internet/fidonet gateway at 1:1/31), and via moral support (my [the_family.html family], both real and the virtual family in the GIGO mailing lists). Thanks also go to michael buttler of fredgate fame for inspiration, and to Ramon van der Winkel of WaterGate for friendly collaboration.
Jason Fesler May 8, 1997