alt Hacker NewsSimilar story here. I used RoboMail for MS-DOS as the offline reader back in maybe 1992-1993?, connecting to a BBS that interfaced with RelayNet/RIME, which was similar to FidoNet.
RoboMail wasn't TurboVision, but it was very nice as TUIs went at the time. It seems mostly vanished from Google. I was a Turbo Pascal developer myself at the time, and I made an offline reader that I thought was far superior (multiple Turbo Vision windows etc.), but by the time I had gotten close to the point of release, the Internet arrived and I completely lost interest.
I still wish there was an archive of RelayNet, because I used to post a lot, and of course I never kept anything myself. I've never found any archive of the content since it was shut down in 2007.
Also, it's sad to hear that the QWK format's creator died in a swatting incident in 2020, of all things.
> Also, it's sad to hear that the QWK format's creator died in a swatting incident in 2020, of all things.
Oh, man. That sucks. I knew about that tragedy[0] but I never read deep enough to realize that Mark Herring (the gentleman who, arguably, was killed in the incident) was the creator of the QWK format.
It was already a horrific story. Now it just feels that much closer to home. Ugh. RIP Mark Herring.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Tennessee_swatting