Subj : Create message bases
To   : Sean Dennis
From : andrew clarke
Date : Thu Apr 08 2021 07:06 pm

On 2021-04-07 00:03:02, Sean Dennis (1:18/200) wrote to Kai Richter:

 SD> The author, David Nugent (who also wrote the BNU FOSSIL driver, I
 SD> believe), was pissed that so many people used his program and never
 SD> registered it.  I have seen the original message where he told people
 SD> off and then said he was leaving the BBS scene forever.

PKT inspection was always an extremely niche feature, though. The number of sysops who actually needed specialised software to look at PKTs on a regular basis would've only been in the hundreds at best. So his target audience was always going to be pretty small from the start, and it's telling that (to my knowledge) nobody's written a similar program just to do that one thing, without the file manager part. There just wasn't the demand for it.

I'm not sure InspectA had much else going for it. As a file manager it was a bit mediocre. I suspect that was the main reason more people didn't pay for it.

InspectA 1.1 was released in 1993. There was already competition from XTreeGold & Norton Commander, both of which were already extremely popular (and also heavily pirated!) and arguably far superior.

But by 1997 he was fighting a losing battle on a few fronts:

There were now stable versions of ZTreeBold & File Commander/2, both very faithful shareware OS/2 clones of XTreeGold & Norton Commander.

The demise of FidoNet had already begun. Its peak was two years earlier. A lot of BBSes had already closed.

There was also a big increase of free software in FidoNet. For example Maximus and Squish, which ironically David himself worked on, and both of which were later open-sourced.

Then there was a big increase in open source FidoNet software. Msged was a good example, and was something I contributed to intermittantly between 1995-1998. It competed with the shareware version of GoldED, and ultimately probably contributed to its open-sourcing. In 2021 open source software in FidoNet is completely normal, and probably runs on the majority of FidoNet nodes.

Outside of FidoNet the popularity of Windows 95 also signalled the demise of text-mode apps like InspectA or XTreeGold, or GoldED. They still ran under Windows 95 but often not very well, or lacked good OS integration (clipboard support, long filenames...). There was also never a 32-bit Windows version of InspectA, which I thought was a strange omission.
--- GoldED+/BSD 1.1.5-b20180707
 * Origin: Blizzard of Ozz, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia (3:633/267)

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