Computing Then And Now - Filters, Sediment, and Sentiment.
by Bill Buckels March, 2000

"What a long strange trip it's been." - The Grateful Dead

To find out where we are going, first we need to know where we have
been. To that end, I have a tale that owes its life to computing then
and now. In fact, now most folks seem to compute only "now and then" and
let the machines do most of work, but back then we computed all the time
and we did it "the hard way" and worked at it.

And some of us still do.

The Mystery Begins

In 1988, for $5.00 plus shipping and handling, I ordered a "Public
Domain Software" disk from:

Computer Parts Galore (CPG)
316 College Street
Toronto, Canada
(416) 926-2161

The disk (Dated 03/18/86) was called "UT 1.0 Dos Utilities", and like
most if not all of CPG's "Public Domain Software", it was actually a
repackaged "Public Brand Software" Disk... (Public Brand Software begat
ZiffNet begat ZDNet's "hotfiles.com").

In Winnipeg, Canada, where I live, BBS's were starting to become
prevalent, but modems were slow, so mail-order was the only inexpensive
way to build a "Public Domain Software" collection. (It took forever to
download even if you could find enough decent files, and no BBS sysop
would give you enough time to download a floppy's worth of files. It
could take weeks... ).

To cut-down on costs even further and make matters better, we would
invariably split the cost of ordering disks with friends, or we would
trade with each other, and make each other copies.

Many mail order houses existed, like "Almost Free Software" and clubs
like the "International Software Library". I used them all.

But my story starts with this particular disk from CPG.

Unwrapping The Package

This disk contained a ReadMe file called PBS.TXT.

PBS.TXT finished with the following notice:

This collection of programs has been provided by and is copyrighted by
Public Brand Software, P.O. Box 51477, Indianapolis  IN  46251
in addition to the copyrights reserved by the individual authors.

Actually, it sort-of says that if the authors don't have a copyright
then Public Brand Software is reserving the rights themselves. But that
is a discussion for another time.

This disk also contained a compressed file in .ARC format called
FILTERS.ARC. (.ARC was the format that we all used before Phil Katz
[PKARC and PKZIP] got sued and the rest of us abandoned .ARC and
followed Phil to smaller and better things like .ZIP files.)

At any rate, FILTERS.ARC contained exactly what I was looking for at the
time... programs with source code. What was even better, these programs
were cool and useful text utilities that I could add to my tool box...
and both benefits amounted to Career Development.

Technically, I was fascinated at the time with small programs. I wrote
in assembly language before I wrote in C, although the C came at about
the same time, immediately following the BASIC. (And so it was in that
time.)

Who Wrote Filters?

The Authorship of most of the filters in FILTERS.ARC was unclear. A
filter typically does not have a copyright notice... since it is not
supposed to display anything. Surprisingly to me even the source code,
with the exception of one of the filters, had no authorship info. (I
have always put my name all over everything so it was hard to imagine a
more modest approach.)

Until March 2000, I assumed that a programmer who I later met in
cyberspace by the name of Ray McVay was the original author of these. In
reality, Ray did completely rewrite one of these, and changed the rest,
adding a check for DOS version.

Of this, Ray today recalls "That was me alright.  Thank goodness I now
use the real things on Unix/Linux boxes instead of those old fakes!
HAHAHA!"

"I found those filters in an archive back in the early MSDOS days when I
was helping Dave Crane with his big BBS down here in Dallas.  They had
no indication of authorship.  I built a filter "framework" that did all
the I/O stuff and left the nitty-gritty to be plugged into the middle.
I then reworked what was there and added a few of my own using that
template.  I'd say if I reworked them in 85 then I probably found that
original archive in 82 or 83."

Ray may be out on his dates, and with all of his contributions to online
forums, I am not surprised if the years of late nights may sometimes
blur a year or two.

So who originally wrote filters before Ray McVay rewrote them? For the
answer to this we need to visit Keith Peterson's Simtel.Net which
contains a file called FILTERS.ZIP in the MS-DOS collection.

FILTERS.ZIP has what appear to be earlier versions of the same filters
that Ray started with. The ReadMe ends with the following credit:

"These filters were written by Joi Ellis of Santa Barbara, CA. If you
have any problems or some ideas you would like to see become 'real'
contact me or leave a message on the Programmer's Shack RBBS
805/968-7871. I hope you find some of these as useful as I have."

Recently I contacted Joi and asked about ownership... "whose code is
this... ??? I hope you will humour me and let me know..."

Joi replied "Well, those were mine.  The 'forclean' filter is the
tipoff, in 1986 I was working for Signal Technology doing a port of a
F77 project to MSDOS.  I wrote all these for solving particular issues
with that project.  I probably still have the originals on a floppy
somewhere in the garage!"

"The TRANSLAT filter was for sending the documentation through a rather
brainless spell-checker routine that couldn't read plain text, only word
lists."

"The filters I wrote were themselves inspired by similar commands
available on unix.  Several of them, like unique, are much simplified
versions of the unix original.  I wrote mine from scratch, though, for
use in my own F77 project."

I said to Joi "I am in the process of releasing a Freeware Collection of
CommandLine Utilities... Part of these utilities include filters... I do
hope that you will allow me to include clones of your filters along with
my own."

"Please, be my guest."

"I would like to give proper credit for your inspiration. Let me know if
you want to review these and approve them."

"Nah, I don't feel any need to review your work.  Inspiration isn't
responsibility, after all.  I would like to have a copy when you're finished,
though.  I avoid using windows as much as I can, being a diehard linux
convert, but I do have to use NT for product testing... "

When I thanked Ray McVay for his inspiration, and asked if he wanted to
approve my work here is what he replied:

"No need; I trust you'll do your normal outstanding job."

When I asked Ray permission to distribute a derivative work, Ray's
comment was "Please do.  Few folks can learn much from ASM any more so
some nice readable C versions would be a lot more educational."

Happy Endings and Happy Beginnings

There are some really amazing things that surround this story of filters
and the folks who write them.

Neither Ray nor Joi knew of each other, yet both collaborated to create
an excellent learning experience for me in another country over a decade
ago.

All of us are still around to tell the tale, and all of us agree that
something is noble and honorable about contributing this sort of effort
as a public service both then and now.

The other thing that stands-out "like crazy" is the caliber of the
hardcore players here... we are all still out there, teaching and
learning, and for all of us, this has been quite a long time now, but we
are still not content to let the machines do all the work...

Otherwise how could we possibly have had our recent dialog about our
shared yet separate pasts and travelled over time and space to share
these separate moments together?

It also kind of reminds me of being a "Road Warrior". It turns-out that
"Two men enter, one man leaves." is not really true in a world as small
as ours.

And that concludes my tale of Filters, Sediment, and Sentiment. So like
Tina Turner said to Mel Gibson after "Thunderdome"... "See you around
Soldier."

Bill Buckels
March 2000

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Appendix A - The Last Words

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2000 22:22:44 -0500
From: Ray McVay
Subject: Re: Article Attached
To: "Bill Buckels" <bbuckels@escape.ca>

> this might just be self-indulgence...

And what use is a medium that won't support a little self-indulgence now
and then, eh? 8-)  Personally I enjoy reading little snippets of history
like this and I think a lot of the new comers need to see how to work
together (even unknowingly) without getting the lawyers involved.  If we
were three of todays [developers] we'd be suing each others' butts off
instead of enjoying the whole thing.

Ray McVay

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Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2000 08:09:38 -0600 (CST)
From: Joi Ellis
To: Bill Buckels <bbuckels@escape.ca>
Subject: Re: Filters

> How would you feel about me distributing this article...

Nice article!  I have no objections whatsoever.

Joi Ellis
Software Engineer

End of Document
