COMMODORE: AMIGA: DLG
Author: Mike Oliphant, Tom Conroy, Crystal Conroy, and James Hastings-Trew (Original Authors)
Author Contacted?: Author Jeff Grimmett has been contacted and will be interviewed.
Software Website: http://www.grimmlabs.com
Additional Notes:
Originally developed by a Canadian company called Telepro Techologies, consisting of Mike Oliphant, Tom Conroy, Crystal Conroy, and James Hastings-Trew. Eventually licensed DLGMail written by Steve Lewis (later was ATIS Technologies)

Bought around 1992 by ATIS Technologies of Pheonix, AZ. Primary developers were Bob Stouder and Steve Lewis.

Bought around 1993 by 'Digerati Dreams / DLG Development', developers were Jeff Grimmett and Bob Stouder.

Licensed for development in 1994 on Unix and Linux platforms to Scottie Swenson (Now named Leeland Artra) and Bob Stouder, respectively. Those licenses have never been exploited to my knowledge.

In 1999 development of DLG was formally halted (before then it was fairly spotty). In 2001 was proclaimed abandonware. The full final version AND source code were made freely available.

"DLG began as Dialog BBS for the Amiga and was based on the unique concept of creating an extention to the Amiga operating system (OS) for BBS communications (thus the term BBS/OS or BBOS). This in turn was based off a C-64 online game system called TSE (The Stock Exchange), which simulated an interactive stock market that users called in to.

"DLG, as it became known, consisted of a number of small, compact modules that presented a minimal memory footprint while in operation. The core of the software is a serial port handler that binds the serial port to an interactive shell session, a resource manager to coordinate locking and releasing of important BBS resources (file and message areas, etc), and a core runtime library containing the most important and widely used functionality in the BBS. This provided the sysop with a powerful means of integrating the BBS with the operating system, including the creation of custom scripting using the Amiga's own scripting resources. Eventually the BBS was extended to utilize the AREXX interpreted scripting language as well (AREXX being the standard high-level scripting language of choice on the Amiga).

"A number of Fidonet mailers were available right from the start, and illustrated the power of the concept: as new mailers became available, it was all a matter of getting the scripting right to use it.

"Fidonet mail really took off on DLG with the introduction of Steve Lewis' 'DLGMAIL' utilities. This, coupled with TrapDoor (included with the BBS on a limited license), proved to be an incredibly powerful and expandable mail processing platform. A DLG BBS with DLGMail could process mail more effeciently than most MSDOS-based mailers on systems with many times the raw CPU power." - Jeff Grimmett