Blue Wave

Blue Wave is a file-based offline mail reader that was popular among bulletin board system users, especially users of FidoNet and other networks that generated large volumes of mail. The name "Blue Wave" refers to both the software reader program and the format of the mail packets, as other offline mail readers have been written that support the Blue Wave format.

Blue Wave was released to the public September 20, 1990 by Fred Rappuhn and George Hatchew, and marketed via their company, Blue Wave Software. Fred Rappuhn and George Hatchew were fellow Sysops who met at a picnic for local area Sysops. During this picnic, the concept of Blue Wave was born and development was started immediately. Fred Rappuhn concentrated on the offline reader while George Hatchew concentrated on the doors that would convert the BBS message system to a Blue Wave format. This packet could then be downloaded and read offline by the Blue Wave Reader. It quickly gained success and soon became one of the top offline mail readers available. This team proved to be very successful and within a short amount of time had support for all the top BBS systems.

Another offline mail packet format called QWK was created in 1987, but did not gain a wide following until much later. Blue Wave became fairly popular in the early 1990s, as at the time QWK was generally limited to PCBoard systems, on which it was based. However, new QWK "doors" for other popular BBS systems soon appeared and its popularity grew considerably. The Blue Wave client software was then adapted to allow it to read and write QWK as well as Blue Wave files.

Fred Rappuhn was hired as a programmer by EDS in September 1991 and soon was unable to continue development for Blue Wave Software. Blue Wave Software dissolved and George Hatchew started Cutting Edge Computing to continue the development of Blue Wave. Hatchew was later involved in a serious car accident, and was unable to continue development of the system past 1993.

Like QWK, Blue Wave message files consisted of a selection of seemingly randomly named files. Messages themselves were stored in the main .DAT file, supported by an information file and a file containing the headers for each message, and a pointer to the body in the DAT.

Blue Wave packet format has also been supported by other offline mail readers such as "BlueMail", [http://multimail.sourceforge.net/ "MultiMail"] and "Wolverine".

Y2K

The Y2K date problem hit Blue Wave, like so many other programs. The Blue Wave Reader that the end users use to read their mail exhibited the problem by the addition of a numerical digit leading the TO: name in the header. The Blue Wave Door on the BBS' exhibited the problem by creating three digit years where there should have been a two digit year. Several fixes not directly related to Blue Wave were created but they worked on the actual messages after they had been imported into the local message bases.

In October 1999, Dale Shipp created a fix called [http://www.wpusa.dynip.com/files/BLUEWAVE/BWRF066.ZIP BWREPFIX] that corrects the problem on the users end. This solution uses a batch file in the archiver section rather than calling the archiver directly. In the batch file, the outbound message dates are fixed and then the batch file calls the archiver which then packs the messages for transmitting to the BBS.

[http://www.wpusa.dynip.com/files/BLUEWAVE/BW-Y2K.ZIP Another Y2K fix] was created and released in October 2005. This fix is a patch to the binary date library provided by the Borland International C++ libraries that the Blue Wave Door and Reader programs are compiled with. This fix is considered to be a cleaner solution to the problem because the actual library is repaired internally which means that this method doesn't require any external tools to perform the fixing of the dates. If you switch to using this fix and you were using Dale Shipp's BWREPFIX, you must revert the archiver compression back to calling the archiver directly. Information is provided that allows this fix to be applied to other programs as well. Provided are patched versions of the Blue Wave Reader for DOS (16-bit versions 2.20 and 2.30, 32-bit version 2.30) and a patched version of the 16-bit v3.11 Blue Wave Door for the Telegard BBS. This patch has been successfully applied to other flavors of the BBS door and initial testing has shown them to work as designed. Some advanced knowledge is required to apply this fix to programs not already patched.

ee also

*QWK
*SOUP
*ZipNews

External links

* [http://www.wpusa.dynip.com/files/BLUEWAVE/BW-Y2K.ZIP Blue Wave Y2K Patch - Patch for the BBS Door and the Reader]
* [http://www.wpusa.dynip.com/files/BLUEWAVE/BWRF066.ZIP BWREPFIX - Y2K fix for Blue Wave Reader]
* [http://help-site.com/local/BWSTRUCT.TXT The Blue Wave Offline Mail System - Mail Packet File Structures]
* [http://www.faqs.org/faqs/off-line-readers/usenet/intro/section-10.html Offline Readers FAQ]
* [http://www.kannoncom.com/~jhanoian/readers/read-dos-hist.htm Offline Mail Readers List]