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There was no original intention to start a "TNOS" project. I stumbled onto GRINOS and found it to be FUN and CHALLENGING. This caused me to look around and I found JNOS, which was more complete and stable. After initial testing, I ws ready to replace the AA4RE BBS that I was running at our club station. I asked the operator of the BBS that was feeding me traffic to hold off for a few days while I made the change.
All went well, everything was in place, users were happy. So I told the BBS SYSOP to start feeding me traffic. BOOM! CRASH! POW! POP! There were 30 second (and greater) delays changing into certai message areas that held more than 500 messages. Messages selected for forwarding never left the system, since the other BBS was timing out waiting for my system to FIND what I wanted to send.
And trying to remotely SYSOP left me frustrated, since very few commands could be executed without going into remote sysop mode, and back again.
And so the sleepless nights started! I became labeled by those helping with the project as the "programmer that never sleeps"! Mad dashes through the code were made to make temporary adjustments to bring the performance up to an acceptable level.
After getting several in the Tampa area to serve as beta-testers (in addition to the original club BBS), I then set out to clean up the rubble and make sense of it.
Then (while on a roll) I decided to enhance many of the existing features, including the Conference Bridge. Additional servers were added. A few GUI "frills" were added. A few adjustments were made to make it work better with ROSE, since that is what our local network uses.
Thus begat TNOS! Several were critical that I did not let the world get their hands on it earlier, but since this was never MEANT to be anything other than a personal project, I did not see that I had the time to put into supporting a project in turmoil. I waited until it was stable (relatively) and not undergoing daily changes. I'm sorry if that didn't please everyone, but (to paraphrase the song), "It's my code and I'll release when I want to".