The Journey…

Part 1

In April 2012 I (Dan FitzGerald – also known as K-Guide) had the pleasure of working with Jim Sellect in the hopes of acquiring the rights of C-Net Developer System II or the more commonly used name of C-Net DS2.  While he was open the the idea, the problem was that he did not have the hardware necessary to obtain the source code files that were trapped on his old Amiga’s SCSI hard drives.  Nevertheless he was willing to give it a go.

By June 2012 we  closed the deal for Storm’s Edge Technologies to acquire any and all rights to C-Net Developer System II (aka C-Net DS2).  He was kind enough to provide not only the source code to all the ML routines, but also eleven 5 1/4″ disk as well as 60 Amiga floppy disks with backups of his Amiga system.

At this point I was about to embark on a delightful journey exploring all the files on each of the disks and the mysteries they would reveal.  You see, I was enamored by BBS systems and ran my first board with C-Net v10.0 and from that point forward I had a passion for C-Net.  Later, I would run systems with C-Net 128 as well as C-Net Amiga.

Before I could get started, I need to protect and preserve what I had just acquired.  So I needed to make a backup of each disk.  The results were better than I had expected give the age of the disks.  All but a single 5 1/2 imaged perfectly (that’s 10 out of 11 imaged just fine) and 52 out of 60 Amiga disks imaged without any problems.

Now, my journey could begin…

Most of the Amiga disk had various versions of the ML code so with 60+ disks that’s a lot of ML file versions to go through; 343 to be exact.  High praises goes out to Jim Sellect for keeping those versions and most of them fairly well commented.  Believe me, I have seen project code so much worse off, so I was pleasantly surprised.  Some of the other disks had utilities, or previous versions of C-Net.

It took a bit of time to get all that organized so that I could start to make sense of what all I had and after many night of searching I finally discovered that while I had all the ML code to C-Net DS II, I did not have a clean copy of the basic files just enough of them for the previous developer (Jim Sellect) to test the software.

Stay tuned for Part II