From pen@lysator.liu.se Tue Aug 25 19:34:03 1992 From: pen@lysator.liu.se (Peter Eriksson) Newsgroups: alt.sources Subject: LysKOM (was: Re: Looking for info on "cosy" software) Date: 25 Aug 92 13:49:38 GMT Organization: Lysator Academic Computer Society, Linkoping University, Sweden dj@ssd.kodak.com (Dave Jones) writes: >In article cliff@demon.co.uk (Cliff Stanford) writes: >>William Daniels (wdaniels@ds5000.DAC.Northeastern.edu) wrote: >>: >>: I'm interested in any information concerning the "cosy" bulletin >>: board system. I was told that the software was developed at the >>: University of Guelth in Canada, but that they had sold the >>: software to a private firm. >> >> A version of CoSy is available from cixadmin@cix.compulink.co.uk. >>It has been seriously enhanced since leaving the University of Guelph. >> Regards, >> Cliff. >COSY is the system used in the US on BIX, formerly the Byte Information >Exchange, recently sold by the publishers of Byte Magazine to General >Videotex Corporation. Assuming that the interface presented by BIX is >the standard one, I have to say that COSY is unlikely to start a >revolution in online communication. It has either a very terse "expert" >mode, or for beginners a mediocre numbered-menu system. >Most BIX addicts used third party software to download and sort messages >on their local machine. Most of this software is written for IBM PC and >compatibles. With these tools, BIXing is better than most BBS message >bases (mostly because of the quality of the contributors) and marginally >ahead of Unix stuff like "rn", though I hear good things about TIN and >should really get a copy..... Perhaps people should check out the LysKOM online conferencing system? It's a dervative of the KOM (produced by QZ in Stockholm, for DECsystem-20 machines), and if my information is correct, a very distant relative to the FORUM conferencing system. It also looks somewhat like the commercial PortaCOM system. LysKOM is free, released under the GNU copyleft. Right now the only working client user interface is written in Emacs LISP. The most updated version uses Swedish for the messages so it might be somewhat hard for most people to understand. There is an English version available though and we are working on updating the messages in the current version. I think that there are German and Norweigan versions available too. There is a small NNTP hack written in Perl that allows some NNTP-based readers to access the database too. Please note that this system is *not* like other BBS system. Ie, there is no provision for file up and downloading and such. (Why anyone would want that when there are FTP I don't know... :-) And it's multiuser and "faster" than news too. Ie, when one user "posts" a message, the other online users get information about it immediately. And users logging in later can read the message at that time. The sources to the server and client(s) are available via anonymous FTP >from ftp.lysator.liu.se in the directory pub/lyskom. /Peter -- Peter Eriksson pen@lysator.liu.se Lysator Academic Computer Society ...!uunet!lysator.liu.se!pen University of Linkoping, Sweden I'm bored. Flame me.