Editing Synchronet (section)

==History==
Synchronet was originally written by Rob Swindell ([[Aka (initialism)|a.k.a.]] Digital Man) due to his desire for certain features which [[WWIV]] lacked, such as support for multiple simultaneous nodes, batch [[upload]]s and bidirectional [[protocol for file transfer|file transfer]].  The bulk of the programming for the first version of Synchronet was done during a two-month period in 1991 when Swindell was house-ridden while he recovered from surgery.  The software was named for its ability to run [[Synchronization (computer science)|synchronously]] on a [[computer network|network]].

In July 1991, the author began running his own BBS, Vertrauen, on Synchronet.  Initially, he had no intention of releasing Synchronet publicly, but as word of his software spread and he received offers to buy copies of Synchronet, he eventually relented, formed a company called Digital Dynamics, and sold copies of Synchronet at a price of $100 without [[source code]], and $200 with source code.  In April 1992, Swindell's employer went out of business and he began to rely exclusively on commercial sales of Synchronet for his livelihood, placing advertisements in the BBS-related magazines ''[[Boardwatch]]'' and ''[[BBS Callers Digest]]''.  The first copy of Synchronet sold through the magazine ads was in June 1992.

Synchronet was the first BBS package to support [[QWK (file format)|QWK]] message networking natively without requiring any external utilities, in version 1a revision 10, released June 25, 1992.  It was also the first BBS package with [[Remote imaging protocol|RIP]] support, in version 1b revision 1, released January 23, 1993.

Interest in Synchronet began to dwindle in late 1994, finally becoming nonexistent in 1995.  Digital Dynamics effectively went bankrupt in the fall of 1995.  Despite this, a beta version of version 2.30 of Synchronet for MS-DOS and an alpha version for OS/2 were released in early 1996.  In August 1996, Swindell announced the uncertainty of Synchronet's future.  In 1997, version 2.30 of Synchronet was released as [[freeware]], and the [[source code]] was released into the [[public domain]] later that year.

In April 1999, Swindell revived Synchronet development, revamping it considerably and converting much of the code to [[C++]].  Another version, 2.30c, was released in December 1999, fixing [[Year 2000 problem|Y2K]] bugs and introducing some minor new features from the upcoming 3.x series.  Version 3.00b was released June 25, 2000 and was the first official release of the 3.x series, featuring a native 32-bit Windows version and many new Internet-related features, such as a built-in [[telnet]] server.  For this release, dial-up support was dropped making it a TCP/IP-only system.  In October 2000, Synchronet was released under the terms of the [[GNU General Public License]] (GPL).

In late 2001, Stephen Hurd (Deuce) joined the project initially as *nix developer.  He ported the BBS to FreeBSD and did much of the Linux development work.  His first "big" contribution was an implementation of Borlands [[conio.h|conio]] library to allow the configuration utilities which were originally written for DOS to run on the Unix-like platforms.

Around the same time, Swindell started embedding the [[SpiderMonkey]] JavaScript engine into Synchronet with an eye towards replacing the aging BAJA language which was used for most BBS customizations.  While the BBS still requires BAJA scripts, much can be done with JavaScript.  A socket object was added to the JavaScript engine and a "Services" server created which allowed simple TCP/IP services to be written easily.  TCP/IP services written in JavaScript bundled with Synchronet include [[Finger protocol|finger]], [[Gopher (protocol)|gopher]], [[IRC]], and [[NNTP]].

More internet services have been added in the native (C) code: [[FTP]], [[SMTP]] and [[POP3]] by Rob Swindell and [[rlogin]], [[Secure Shell|SSH]] and [[HTTP]] by Stephen Hurd.

In an interesting full circle, direct dial-up support for Synchronet is available again as Rob Swindell wrote a modem to telnet gateway program (SEXPOTS) for this purpose.  Using this program, SysOps can once again offer their BBSes via direct modem-to-modem connections.