Telegard

» see telegard.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

the telegard faq opens by telling you not to trust it. "none of the history contained herein should be considered gospel," it says, before explaining that half of what circulates about the software's past is hearsay and only the recent part was ever written down. that is the documentation shipped inside the product, warning the sysop about the product's own origins.

the reason for the warning is the first line of the story. telegard was written in pascal on top of wayne bell's wwiv source code, obtained in a form that the article describes as an unauthorized copy, and released around 1986. the date carries a citation-needed tag that has been sitting on it since 2007, which is roughly as solid as anything in the early part of this gets.

what it was, once it existed, was free. pcboard cost money and the major bbs cost serious money, and telegard cost nothing, which is why a fifteen year old with a spare phone line ran telegard. it handled cd-roms internally and it had remote administration built into the main program, so the sysop could run the board from the board.

i am a software engineer and this is the part of the story i recognize, and it is not the boards. it is the provenance. every project i have worked on has a version of this question underneath it somewhere: where did this file come from, and what happens on the day somebody needs to give it away. telegard is what that question looks like after twenty years of nobody answering it.

~ the record ~

~ five sets of hands ~

carl mueller took bell's code and made the first telegard out of it. eric oman took it from mueller, then brought in martin pollard because he was out of his depth, and todd bolitho and robert mcnaughton joined after that. the team got as far as the 2.5 release and then came apart, with bolitho and mcnaughton leaving over what the faq calls creative differences and oman leaving because it had stopped being fun.

pollard kept working alone until oman sued him, which stopped development outright for a while. version 2.7 arrived in 1991 and stayed the version most boards ran for years afterward. pollard left in 1993 and in september of that year the project went to tim strike, a utility author who had been on the beta team. strike gutted and rebuilt the message and file handling over eighteen months, shipped the first public result as 2.99 gamma 1 in july 1995, and got to 3.0 the following year.

~ the inheritance ~

the thing telegard is actually known for is not telegard. renegade was built from its code and became one of the most widely run dos board packages there was. iniquity and a string of others came off the same tree, and mystic bbs, which is still maintained, describes itself as the spiritual successor to telegard and renegade at once.

that is a familiar shape now and it was not then. a piece of software whose main output is other software, whose users are mostly people who forked it, is the ordinary condition of open source in 2026. telegard got there in the early nineties by accident, with no license anywhere in it, run by people mailing each other zip files.

~ the last word ~

the last release is telegard 3.09 gamma 2, dated 5 july 1998, in a dos build and an os/2 build. service pack 4, the year 2000 fix, is dated 25 december 1999. then nothing for six years.

in 2005 strike posted to the tg_support echo on fidonet, which is the correct place to hold a funeral for this particular product. he wrote that he was not sure the pc holding the source code could still boot, and that he had neither the time nor the will to carry the project himself. then the part that closes it: he could not open source the code, because as much as he had rewritten, other individuals still held copyrights inside it, and he would not move it without their consent.

so it sits there. a free bbs package that cannot be given away, assembled out of code that was never licensed in the first place, owned in pieces by people who scattered in 1991. telegard.net stopped resolving. a project called opentg started in august 2008 to rebuild the whole thing from scratch specifically so that none of the original code would be in it, and never shipped a release.

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