Aaron - Thank you for putting this code out on Github. It is a fitting tribute to your father's work and his life. I wish you and and your family well.

Super cool. At first I was thinking QModem was the name of an old protocol (like XModem, YModem, ZModem) because it has been so long, but it sounded so familiar. I googled for images and boom - there it is, my childhood. I spent so many hours in this program, and what a great time I had dialing all my local BBSs and downloading all sorts of programs via ZModem on my 14.4K modem. Thank you, Aaron, for making this little piece of my childhood available for inspection and posterity. And may John RIP.

Update: it is also neat it was written in Pascal which was my 2nd language and holds a special place in my heart. I realized early on that BASIC was not ideal for writing professional programs and hadn't yet moved on to C, so Pascal had my attention for a number of years as a teenager.

I love seeing this. I used these tools during my computer-formative years. Now, at 51 with a whole computer career under my belt, I've been thinking a lot about those days. Nostalgia will bias things positively, of course, but I'm look back fondly on how, at least for personal projects, I just did stuff.

At that time, I had no background in "real" CS or best practices. I didn't have the internet advising this way or that, and my only resource was a book or two from B. Dalton. I didn't even really think about good or bad code... merely: does it do the thing I want it to. I just made my programs however I wanted and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Lately, I've wanted to get back to that mode, at least a bit. It is really tough to set aside all of the rigor and analysis I'm accustomed to and just bang something out. Ugly, buggy, happy path only, but at least they exist. Things like Cursor et al. have come along at the right time...

Wow that is a long time ago. I spent so much time in there. I wrote my own BBS software for the MSX in Pascal before that and got a bit obsessed with cramming features. When my family switched to PC, I believed real programmers, including the author of qmodem, of course, programmed in C. If I had known then it was Pascal, I would've been a lot more sure of my young self that I was on the right track (I was 14 or so).

This brought back memories. I remember dialling into BBSes using Qmodem, downloading QWKs (compressed email packets) from “conferences” (similar to newsgroups).

I would read/reply offline using OLX (Offline Express, a QWK reader also part of the Qmodem suite), and then batch upload my replies (.REPs, also compressed) to the BBS.

This was back in the day when you weren't connected 24/7, and when dial-up wasn’t unlimited (in my country — even if it was, BBSes were node limited so you couldn’t stay connected forever). So participating in BBS conferences meant quick dial-ins and uploads, where most of the messaging/replies was done offline.

Although bandwidth is abundant these days, I still think the QWK/REP idea is an attractive one. There is an art and a beauty to crafting replies offline from the cozy Turbo Vision UI that was OLX.