My First Content Management Application

Anybody who knows me knows I'm a sucker for a good meme. I love the very word meme, because it contains "me" in it, twice. ;)

Now it seems a new meme is making the rounds: Pie started a snowball rolling with his blog post My First Content Management Application, which begat similar posts by Jon Marks, Johnny Gee, Lee Dallas, and CherylMcKinnon all telling how they got started in the content-management biz. I can't help but chime in at this point, meme-ho that I am.

Back in the paleolithic predawn of the Internet, before there was a Web, there was FidoNet. Instead of Web sites, there were electronic bulletin board systems, and in 1988, I was the sysop of a BBS powered by the freeware Opus system. Opus essentially put me in the content management business, although no one called it that at the time, of course.

Opus was extremely popular not only because it supported the bandwidth-efficient ZModem protocol but because it was a highly configurable system, thanks to a one-off scripting language that let you exercise godlike control over every imaginable system behavior. The Opus scripting language was my first introduction to any kind of programming.

In those days, bandwidth was dear (modems ran at 300 and 1200 baud) and you took great pains to compress files before sending them over the wire. The most popular compression software at the time was SEA's ARC suite, the code for which went open-source in 1986. ARC seemed adequately fast (it would process files at around 6Kbytes per sec on a reasonably fast PC, which is to say one with a 8MHz processor) until a guy named Phil Katz came along with an ARC-compatible program that ran six to eight times faster. In a matter of a year or so, almost every BBS switched from supporting ARC to supporting PKARC.

SEA sued Phil Katz for copyright violation (Katz had violated the terms of the open-source license) and a major legal fracas ensued. BBS operators, unsure of their legal exposure, didn't know whether to stay with PKARC or go back to the much slower ARC (and risk losing visitors). Being young and foolishly optimistic, I decided to write my own compression and archiving software for the use of my BBS customers. I decided it would be a good thing, too, if it was faster than PKARC. Of course, I would have to learn C first.

Thus began an adventure that led toward the path that finds me where I am today, free-ranging in the CMS jungle as an analyst. I'll save the details of that adventure for another time. Suffice it to say, I did learn C, I did write a compression program, and it was faster (though less efficient) than Phil Katz's routines, and in fact I won a bakeoff that led to my code being licensed by Traveling Software for use in their then-popular Laplink connectivity product. Katz lost the bakeoff. (He also lost the lawsuit with SEA.) But he eventually did all right for himself. Perhaps you've heard of Pkzip?

So to answer a question no one asked (except Pie), my first "content" application was in fact a compression and archiving program that I wrote in 1988 to support users of an Opus BBS. That's what started me down the path of learning C, then Java, JavaScript, HTML, XML, and all manner of W3Cruft leading to the purple haze I walk around in today.