Citadel is the name of a bulletin board system software program, and of the genre of programs it inspired. Citadels were notable for their room-based structure (see below) and relatively heavy emphasis on messages and conversation as opposed to gaming and files. The first Citadel came online in 1980 with a single 300 baud modem; eventually many versions of the software, both clones and those descended from the original code base (but all usually called "Citadels"), became popular among BBS callers and sysops, particularly in areas such as the Pacific Northwest, Northern California and Upper Midwest of the United States, where development of the software was ongoing. Citadel BBSes were most popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but when the Internet became more accessible for online communication, Citadels began to decline. However, some versions of the software, from small community BBSes to large systems supporting thousands of simultaneous users, are still in use today. Citadel development has always been collaborative with a strong push to keep the source code in the public domain. This makes Citadel one of the oldest surviving FOSS projects. BBS redirects here. ... Year 1980 (MCMLXXX) was a leap year starting on Tuesday (link displays the 1980 Gregorian calendar). ... The public domain comprises the body of all creative works and other knowledge—writing, artwork, music, science, inventions, and others—in which no person or organization has any proprietary interest. ... FOSS is an acronym for free and open source software that is most often used in English-speaking military software communities. ...

The Citadel user interface

Typical Citadel BBS screen

The utilization of a natural metaphor, the concept of rooms devoted to topics, marked Citadel's main advancement over previous BBS packages in the area of organization. Messages are associated with rooms, to which the user moves in order to participate in discussions; similarly, a room could optionally give access to the underlying file system, permitting the organization of available files in an organic manner. Most installations permitted any user to create a room, resulting in a dynamic ebb and flow closer to true conversation that most other BBS packages achieved. Certain versions of Citadel extend the metaphor of rooms with “hallways” and/or “floors,” organizing groups of rooms according to system requirement. By contrast, previous bulletin board software emphasized the availability of files, with a single uncoupled message area that could only be read linearly, forward or backward. Image File history File links Download high resolution version (826x462, 13 KB)Typical Citadel BBS screen, showing messages, a message entry area, and a message save prompt. ... Image File history File links Download high resolution version (826x462, 13 KB)Typical Citadel BBS screen, showing messages, a message entry area, and a message save prompt. ... Rotating coupling A coupling is a device used to connect two shafts together at their ends for the purpose of transmitting power. ...

Citadel further improved the user experience in the area of command and control. Based on Alan Kay’s philosophy of user-interface design, “Simple things should be simple; complex things should be possible,” and influenced by the fact that Citadel was developed in an era of 300 baud modems, the basic and most heavily used commands are accessed via single keystrokes. The most common commands are <G>oto (the next room with new messages), <N>ew messages (display the New messages in the room to the user), and <E>nter a message into the room. Other single keystroke commands exist as well, such as <K>nown rooms, which lists the rooms known to the user. Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) is an American computer scientist, known for his early pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design. ...

This elegantly small command set made the system so usable that many daily users during Citadel’s golden era were never aware that Citadel also provided sophisticated capabilities. These are known as the “dot” commands and build logically from the set of single keystroke commands. A simple example would be the requirement to go directly to a specified room. The user would type <.G>oto <roomname>”, where the text between the brackets is user typed, while the rest is filled in by the system. A more complex example might be <.R>ead <A>ll rooms <Z>modem <N>ew messages (.RAZN), which results in all of the new messages in all of the rooms known to the user being sent to the user via the ZMODEM protocol. Filters for users, keyword searches, and other capabilities have been implemented, depending on the version of Citadel. ZMODEM is a protocol for file transfer with error checking and crash recovery. ...

History

Citadel was originally written for the CP/M operating system in 1981 by Jeff Prothero, known to the nascent Citadel world as Cynbe ru Taren (CrT). Unlike most BASIC-based BBS programs of the time, it was written in a fairly standard dialect of C known as BDS C, a compiler written and distributed by Leor Zolman. The first installation came online in December, 1981, running on a Heathkit H-89, and in its 6 month lifetime achieved immediate success. CP/M is an operating system originally created for Intel 8080/85 based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. ...

Version 2 debuted on David Mitchell's ICS BBS, and with the release of 2.11, Jeff Prothero's involvement with the project came to an end (due to the "sugar bunny incident"). He released the source to the public domain and it became available as a download from various systems as well as through the C Users Group.

At this point, the history of Citadel becomes complex as many individuals began modifying the source to their own ends, and lacking modern distributed source tracking, innovations were never incorporated into a central source repository, as such a thing did not exist. Initially, Bruce King, David Bonn (releasing under the name Stonehenge), Caren Park, and James Shields, amongst others, picked up the opportunity in the Seattle area.

The longest lived fork from the 2.10 code started in the American Midwest, when Hue White (aka Hue, Jr.) [Edit: his name was Hue An Wang, from Minnesota, I worked with him on a branch known as "TBE BBS" for the TI-99/4A - joke in the source, "Moo: udderly hideous kludge" in Hue's work ] ported the code to MS-DOS and called it Citadel-86 ("C-86"). His board, Citadel-86 Test System, served not only as a discussion board and distribution center for the software, but also was the focal point for a lively Citadel-86 community in the 612 area code (the Twin Cities), which at their peak numbered roughly forty systems, and probably more than 100 over the years. Numerous suggestions from sysops and users, both local and national, guided the growth of Citadel-86, including the addition of a network capability as well as enhancements to the command set. Hue's contributions were substantial enough that several other porting projects used Citadel-86 as source material, such as Asgard-86 (MS-DOS), Macadel (Macintosh), STadel (Atari ST, fnordadel), Citadel-68K (Amiga), and Citadel:K2NE (MS-DOS), and many of these contributed back to Hue Jr's project. Most of these ports were compatible with the growing Citadel-86 network (C86Net). Local systems would network with each other on a demand basis (due to the work of David Parsons), while the long haul network was serviced late at night.

An early fork from Citadel-86 was DragCit, written by The Dragon. DragCit also introduced networking code, but the DragCit network was not generally compatible with the Citadel-86 network. DragCit forked to several more versions, eventually leading to efforts to merge several code bases under the guidance of Matt Pfleger, Richard Goldfinder, Brent Bottles, Don Kimberlin, and Elisabeth Perrin, the end result being Citadel+, a multiuser capable version of the software, which also included advanced scripting, user control of message displays, and other features. At this point, the connection of the code in Citadel+ to the original Citadel code must have been tenuous at best.

Other Citadel implementations

Implementations that share the familiar Citadel user interface, but are not derived from the original Citadel code base, are also common. They have ranged from vanity projects such as a Citadel-like control program to control the serial port of an advanced graphing calculator, to full-blown efforts to modernize the Citadel interface with modern protocols.

Some of the more notable ones included Glenn Gorman's TRS-80 BASIC implementation called Minibin, a clone of Cit-86 intended to run on a Unix running on Motorola processors called Cit/68, and a Unix version called Citadel/UX. Citadel/UX is still being developed, extending the Citadel metaphor to enable what its developers call "a messaging and collaboration platform (for) connecting communities of people together": a groupware platform. Citadel/UX is referred to simply as "Citadel" in its documentation and web site, although the developers no longer assert a previous claim that it is the only remaining actively developed implementation. This article does not cite any references or sources. ... This article is about the programming language. ... More screenshots on the project site // What is Citadel? Citadel (formerly Citadel/UX) is an open source groupware (messaging and collaboration) software package, written to run on open source operating systems such as Linux or BSD. It is designed to be a messaging platform that you can build a community... Collaborative software, also known as groupware, is application software that integrates work on a single project by several concurrent users at separated workstations (see also Computer supported cooperative work). ...

Several attempts have also been made to adapt the Citadel paradigm to the World Wide Web, including Webadel, written by Jarrin Jambik, a former Citadel-86 sysop, and [1]Anansi-web], hosted by former Citadel-86 Sysop, Ultravox the Muse. The only current actively developed web-enabled Citadels are Citadel/UX and PenguinCit, a PHP-based Citadel. WWWs historical logo designed by Robert Cailliau The World Wide Web (commonly shortened to the Web) is a system of interlinked, hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. ...

External links

• The Citadel Archive (Mirror site, Another Mirror Site), the largest repository of historical information about Citadel implementations. Contains archived software of many different Citadel versions, as well as the Citadel Family Tree (Mirror site, Another Mirror Site), which shows the relationship of the various code branches descending from the original Citadel.
• Homepage for Citadel/UX, currently called simply "Citadel"
• Early text file (1982) about CrT's Citadel and its earliest descendants
• The release notes from Citadel 2.1 in 1982, containing interesting comments from CrT about the basic philosophy behind the Citadel user interface.

Active Citadels

• KaraNet BBS, http://www.karanet.at/, the largest Austrian BBS (DOC) - telnet www.karanet.at, or secure ssh -2 -l bbs www.karanet.at
• depths of hell BBS, running BBS100. Telnet to bbs.hell.org ([2]).
• The Dog Pound II BBS, Formerly known as The Dog Pound BBS, running Citadel/Ux, one of the major hubs of the larger Citadel BBS network. Also available via SSL, or you can telnet to dogpound2.citadel.org ([3]) or ssh to bbs@ dogpound2.citadel.org.
• eschwa BBS - for a particular subgroup of DOC users, often considered the endpoint of several migrations, (possibly) from ISCABBS to Heinous BBS, from Heinous BBS to Atrium BBS, and from Atrium BBS to eschwa BBS. Telnet to bbs.eschwa.com:6969 ([4]) or ssh to bbs@bbs.eschwa.com.
• Haven BBS, One of Indiana's oldest surviving BBSes (started 1992), running Citadel/UX. Alternatively, ssh to bbs@havenbbs.org.
• ISCABBS.com - Started in 1989 and still the largest active DOC (Dave's Own Citadel) BBS. Telnet to bbs.isca.uiowa.edu ([5]).
• Slumberland via web (Java) interface, one of the last remaining Citadels running on an implementation derived from the original code: a multi-user version of Citadel+ (established in 1991). Alternatively, telnet to bbs.slumberland.org ([6]).
• UNCENSORED! BBS, the home BBS of Citadel/UX, established in 1988.
• BARBARIA the last of the many citadel BBS'es in Santa Barbara CA
• Utopia Dammit! BBS - a cousin of eschwa, where sporadic development of the DOC codebase still goes on nearly 15 years after its creation. Telnet to bbs.utopiadammit.com ([7]) or ssh bbs@utopiadammit.com with no password.
• Anansi-web, run on Red Hat Linux by Tim Foreman.
• New Moon, a PHP-based implentation by Angst Badger.