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Quantum Link Reverse Engineered
JeffLedger writes "A group of retro-geeks have rebuilt the old Quantum Link system to allow both emulated and real c64's to sign in over the Internet using the original software. Before it was called America Online, Quantum Link provided a pre-Internet online service to Commodore users."
I always wanted to try out Qlink, maybe this is my chance. :)
I still have my Qlink coffee mug. Gets a lot of "What's that?" questions.
I certainly hope so. I still have my SuperQ disk around here. I know what I'm doing this weekend :)
I also wonder how many members of the old Q'mmunity will try this out. I'd love to get back in touch with some of my old Q-Link friends.
I'll also note that I submitted a story last year on the 10-year anniversary of the Q-Link shutdown. It was sadly rejected. I'll give a basic rehash here...
After several months of system degradation, overflows which allowed AOL and Q-Link members to converse, complete UNDERhauls of the Q-Link system to be per^H^H^Hconverted for use within AOL, and the incesant "Come to AOL" emails, Q-Link was unceremoniously shut down at the normal off time. Nobody from AOL showed up to say "Thank you for a spectacularly fun and eventful decade." Nothing. At the bottom of the screen:
THE SYSTEM HAS SHUT DOWN
This was the normal message you saw at shut down, but probably most fitting on this particular morning.
I first subscribed to QuantumLink in 1986 when I was 8 years old. Anyhoo, I was asked to join the "User Advisory Board." In exchange for 240 free "plus" minutes per month, I spent about 30 minutes in a People Connection room with several employees of QLink, one of whom had the screen name "SteveCase"
:-)
I wonder if they've reverse engineered Puzzler or Club Caribe...
Any other Canadians use QuantumLink? As a young person without much of a concept of money and how usage fees can multiply, I was blown away by the first month's bill we received for QuantumLink. 20 hours of use -- after some bizarre internal long distance charges, access fees, and currency conversion -- worked out to about $200. Club Caribe was fun, but the bill (and my parents' reaction at the time) made it a service that I disconnected from quickly.
Like another poster above asked, has anyone been able to connect to the server and see if Club Caribe worked?
Is P3 your baby? Yep, as far as I can recall P3 is still supported for some of those older clients. I remember in the late 90s there was work to talk to some clients via L2TP instead, and of course servers never send the whole input packet around to each other anymore; it gets abstracted much closer to the edge. But at some level, I suspect vestiges of P3 are still in daily use; the two-character routing token the most obvious one.
I am pretty sure I have a file or two around here that uses 0x7F as a line feed (or was it FF?)
Zork III, for G-d's sake! Am I wrong? Epyx Summer Games... Drol... For cryin' out loud, Choplifter!. Don't you dare forget Choplifter!!!
Oh, my god, I almost forgot Mule and Archon, and that stupid game I typed in from Compute!'s Gazette, "Spike".
There was a typo in that one, I remember. It was all machine language. Pure numbers, six 3-digit numbers and a checksum per line. Terribly boring to type in. One of the lines wouldn't check properly. I looked at the code and saw that there was a combination of 032 211 255, or in hex, $20 $D3 $FF. Since the MC6510 was big-endian, that translated to JSR $FFD3, a bad Kernel jump table address.
Since $FFD2 was a known quantity (the kernel jump table address for printing a character to the text screen at the current cursor point), I figured that must be wrong. Since it was only one byte off, it couldn't be a useful address.
Long story even longer, I changed the address, the checksum worked, and I had a fun game to play after another two hours of 10-key typing.
Ah, to be 13 again...
The CB App. What's your 20?
It's like Homo neanderthalensis, recognisable as a precursor to ourselves, but a completely different beast.
Sorry to be nitpicky, but you chose completely the wrong example to use as an analogy.
Homo Neanderthalensis . . . yeah, they used to be seen as a precursor to "humankind", but that was due in a large part to the fact that scientists, unfortunately for the accuracy of results and theories, are human . . . archaeologists and paleontologists inherited from their cultures a huge burden of preconceptions about what "human" is, and combined with some of the initial findings of the Neanderthals being actually terribly diseased and atypical examples, along with the misclassification of any artifacts left behind as instead being left behind by Homo Sapiens . . . well, it's only recently (relatively speaking) that the scientific community has started to wake up to the rather non-linear relationship of "us to them".
Now, naturally, conclusions are far from certain. At some point the Neanderthals diverged; but it's hard to argue that then the human race continued on and left them behind, the actual demise of the Neanderthals is a trickier business. Arguments range from interbreeding (we're all Neanderthals!) to ourbreeding (as in, humans moved into Neanderthal territory as climates changed, and like rabbits we just outpopulated them, pushing them away), to war (stone age style), combinations of all the above, and more. What is at least certain, though, is that the Neanderthals weren't, uhh, of the nature that you describe them as being.
Some random sources for cross-reference:
Descent of Man - Neanderthal
Even a random religous tract from 1998 notes that Neanderthals are "no longer thought to be lineal ancestors of Homo Sapiens".
There's also some in-depth information here and here, and etc.
Not sure why I spent that brief period of time dredging all that up, I'll probably either be ignored or modded (probably rightfully, though unfortunately it's a policy that squashes interesting tangential discussion) off-topic. Oh well!
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
12:33AM Central, and server is handling the load OK. Thanks /. for the stress test. Pics appear to be back up, but they are not on the QLink server anyway, so they are expendable.
I've been so hard at work on the code, I don't have much docs, but you can ask away.
You can also email me (looks pretty easy to Google and find my email, so I'll let that be the test) if you are having connect issues.
Jim
1) The Commodore community has always wanted the service back. It was more than a service, it was a community. 2) The exercise was worth more than years of classes in software development and error/runtime diagnosis. In my current vocation, I am often relied on to diagnose issues that are surprisingly like trying to decipher a communication between two parties I have little knowledge of. 3) It was a nice brain (pun not intended, for those who know who this is) exercise, trying to carry on a conversation with a piece of software when you only know one half of the verbs and nouns. At work, I do things in an insulated world of HTTP, SOAP, XML, etc., and one has to have a challenge to keep the brain cells working well. 4) It was there. So be it. 5) I wanted to be on /. (well, not really, but that's what everyone may think...)
Jim
Is the innocence. :)
:)
The social makeup of the online community 20 years ago was so much different than it is now. Even those of us who are left are 20 years older and different from whom we were then. It's a time and a 'place' that will never again be repeated, although seeing the UI again has sparked some very distant and pleasant memories.
Thanks for bringing it back, and it was interesting to read in the thread what hardware the service originally ran on, I had always wondered. If there are any more details I'd like to know. (how many dial in lines, how were they physically situated...any PHOTOS of the hardware?)
FOr those of you who are wondering about the AOL connection - Quantumlink was run by Quantum Computer Services in Vienna, Virginia. They later started a service for PC and Mac users called America Online, and that later became their entire business and business name. As mentioned earlier, they shut down Qlink and encouraged migration to AOL, and that was the end of that.
This coincided with the general decline of C=64s and 128s in lieu of newer machines. But yes it would have been nice to have Amiga support for it, because for the next 5 or 6 years I owned probably every single model of Amiga ever made at one time or another.
Before getting a shell account with a UUCP newsfeed in '91 or so, I was visiting local multi-line BBSs. (MajorBBS with lots of lines - 16 to 32 lines) and that's where I met pretty much everyone I knew at the time. Local boards are great, because you get to meet everyone eventually at local gatherings. Oh well, that's all gone too. Back to IRC where anyone you don't know is either a pedophile or a cop.
Part of it is that it's debatable whether they ever entirely diverged; the two "species" might have interbred and reintegrated, thus breaking the definition of species. In that case, certainly not "a completely different beast". And of course there's dozens of different takes on the theories, each of them different but nearly all disagreeing with the "recognisable as a precursor to ourselves, but a completely different beast" statement. The specifics of why that statement is wrong, and/or which specific parts are wrong, depends on which hypothesis you follow.
Anyways, to assuage your guilt, I have to note that I honestly wasn't using reverse psychology; I truly believed I'd be modded off-topic, I didn't and don't expect my comment to that effect to change much in that department; indeed, so far I'm somewhat surprised (but things can change). Going off on a tangent can get you punished on Slashdot, indeed it quite regularly does, and I figured if I was already deviating from the original subject matter, I might as well go for the gusto. I would hate myself if I had been trying to trick people into modding me a certain way; moderation is a defence that Slashdot has had to resort to for signal-to-noise reasons and so forth, it's an unfortunate sidenote but one that should be merely the foundation supporting the weight of actual informed discussion. If I was going to play games for points, I might as well just turn to a video game . . .
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!