Roadmap ANSI · 38400 8-N-1 · CP437

The road ahead

Here is roughly what is coming to ATA, in roughly the order it is likely to arrive. There are no dates on any of it, on purpose.

▓▒░ Where things stand

The alpha is out.

Eighteen boards run today and install in one click: RBBS-PC, Fido, Citadel-86e, Asgard-86, Maximus, T.A.G., QuickBBS, RemoteAccess, PCBoard 15.3, The Major BBS, TriBBS, GAP, Spitfire, Searchlight, VBBS, Virtual Advanced, Telegard and Renegade. Doors run inside them the way they always did. There is a SysOp console, a DOS machine room, nightly events, snapshots, and a credential relay that keeps passwords off the wire.

All eighteen are answering in public right now, as an early alpha: call any of them. They are a technical proof of concept, bugs and all.

ATA 0.1.67 Alpha is out for download. It carries everything the five items below promised for the beta. The beta label waits until the alpha has run on real hosts for a while and the bugs that turn up have been fixed; the four items after those are what stands between the beta and a first proper release.

ATA is a hobby project, built alongside a novel, an executive job, and a PhD. It gets built when there is time and the inclination to build it. That is the honest answer about the schedule, and it is why you will not find a single date on this page.

▓▒░ The work to the beta

Prove the lines, move the files.

Complete

The board list

Done. Eighteen packages, each with a verified profile, a staged install, and a real call walked end to end before it shipped.

VBBS and Virtual Advanced are shareware and ship unregistered. A SysOp holding a valid registration, or importing a board that is already registered, runs them registered. VBBS 7 is a registered-user upgrade and cannot be bundled; you can upgrade a board yourself, but it is untested and may or may not work.

The list grows when people ask: here is how to ask.

Complete

File areas that actually transfer

Done. Every one of these boards has a file section, and now the files move: uploads and downloads over XMODEM, YMODEM, YMODEM-G and ZMODEM, through the same serial line the caller is already on, so the board's own file menus do what they always did. Try it on the demo boards.

Complete

Page the SysOp

Done. Every one of these boards has a key that pages the SysOp, and it no longer rings a bell nobody hears. The page reaches the console, and the SysOp can break in and chat, with keystrokes going straight into the caller's session, the way a break-in chat always did.

Complete

Multi-node, tested properly

Done. Multi-node has had its shake: several callers on at once, on the board and in its doors, doing the things that break file sharing, like posting into the same base, fighting in the same door, and dropping carrier at the wrong moment.

Complete

Documentation

Done. The manual covers every page of the console, and each of the eighteen boards has a page of its own with its quirks and the settings that matter. The door guide installs LORD on every board that runs doors, and Galactic Empire and Legends of Kyrandia on The Major BBS.

▓▒░ The work to the first release

Your old board, and mail that moves.

Planned

Import an existing board

The one people ask for most. Upload the directory of the board you already run, or the one on a drive in a closet, and have ATA identify the package, check the version against a verified profile, and bring it up with its users, its message bases and its files intact.

Planned

A text editor in the console

Batch files and configuration files are the two things a SysOp edits constantly, and today that means the DOS machine room or an FTP client. A plain editor in the console makes the common case quick.

Planned

A light file manager

Create a directory, upload a file, and get on with it. Not a replacement for FTP or for the DOS prompt, both of which stay. Just the small jobs, without leaving the browser.

Planned

EchoMail and FidoNet

Message areas shared between boards, the way the old networks did it. A caller posts once and the message turns up on every board carrying that echo. This is the big one, and for a family of software that grew up on FidoNet it is the piece that makes a board feel connected rather than marooned.

▓▒░ Hear when these ship

Nothing here has a date.

The mailing list is how you find out when something arrives. Release news, and nothing else.

Read how ATA works if you would rather know what is already built than what is coming.