Mon, 23 Nov 1992 14:54:09 +0100
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On Mon, 23 Nov 1992 08:42:06 NFT Turgut Kalfaoglu <TURGUT@FRORS12> said:
>I see the point in both cases - the name "Revised LISTSERV" comes from
>the fact that there used to be (before my time :) another LISTSERV (at
>BITNIC?) that had the right idea, but Eric improved it much more with
>his new server, so he called it "Revised." So, the _name_ LISTSERV
>existed before Revised Listserv.
Maybe I should clarify here. The reason the thing we now call BITNET
LISTSERV was initially dubbed "Revised LISTSERV" is, precisely, that
there was another program called LISTSERV; in fact, there were two, the
"BITNIC LISTSERV" and the "NCSUVM LISTSERV". The reason I did not call my
program XYZSERV and, indeed, the reason I wrote it at all is that the
people in charge of the original LISTSERV were spending little or no time
improving it due to having other things to do. There was no compatibility
issue since the original LISTSERV did not accept commands at all, all it
did was receive messages and send them to lists of people, ie about the
functionality of a SMTP exploder (shortly after Revised LISTSERV was
released, a new version of the original LISTSERV with 3-4 commands was
written but it was never released - it only ran at the developer's site).
The server's helpfiles made it clear that this was different code,
explained what was new and described how one could interface the 3 types
of servers without creating loops. Nobody ever complained to me about the
ambiguity of the documentation, nor did anyone ask me to rename my server
to something else.
All these historical documents were removed a few years later as the
original LISTSERV's had disappeared completely and user support people
complained that it confused their users.
Eric
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