Programming – APSoft

The Best Email Server You Never Heard of

Back when Hotmail was the biggest thing in email, WebCom deployed a secret weapon that turned the tide in the email wars. WebCom SMTP (WSMTP) was a multi-phase project to create an entirely new email server from the ground up, something that could handle thousands of emails per second and HUGE attachments. But most importantly, it was designed to allow sysadmins to sleep at night!

WebCom started out humbly using off the shelf tools for the time, Sendmail for email, NCSA httpd for web serving, PERL for our web control panel, and Sybase for our customer database. NCSA httpd was the first component that needed upgrading, it was replaced with Netscape Enterprise Server.

The Creative and Analytical Mind

I have worked at several disciplines throughout my life, a good while ago I made a conscious decision to pursue working in technology roles because that was my most marketable skill set. I have worked as a metal fabricator, machinist, software developer, system administrator, manager, and in a hybrid of various roles.

My current employment is highly analytical, it involves solving problems, doing research, communicating, and helping people with everything from the mundane to crises. I’ve always performed roles like this, but I’ve also pursued more creative and artistic endeavors.

Adding VGA hardware palette support

VGALIB has lead a long and meandering path, development has been an exercise of leveling up each of 3 different environments: PC hardware running DOS, SDL under Linux, and SDL under emscripten. Much of the early development was done in dosbox with the Borland C++ 3.1 IDE, but once I grew past the point of basic C++, using std::string, I had to abandon the BC3.1 IDE and go strictly to makefiles. It was during this time that using the BC3.1 IDE for editing (and it’s weird Brief key sequences) started to become an exercise in patience. I really enjoyed developing on Linux, since that’s what I’ve done for the last 25 years.

Moving to makefiles under DOS was no small feat, the issue is that dosbox is a best effort emulator for running games, but compatibility with Borland C++ 4 and later is sketchy causes crashes. I ended up creating a Windows 2000 VM with Virtualbox to compile VGALIB, but even that acts peculiar and cmd.exe requires End Task. Virtualbox doesn’t have guest additions for any 16bit legacy OSes, so Win2K is the oldest usable environment. My current development environment is Eclipse for the editing (with VIM plugin), Win2K to compile the DOS programs, and dosbox to run them. For Linux and emscripten I use Eclipse with command line make.

The reason my build environment is important to this article has to do with the development target that was most feature complete: SDL running on Linux. Palettized 8bit mode on SDL is really a pain to program to, much more so than straight RGB or RGBA, but it mimics the original IBM VGA 13h mode most closely. I implemented palette support as a matter of requirement when I added SDL support, since there there is no default palette. Until this time I hadn’t added hardware palette support to the VGA driver, I simply relied on the default VGA palette (which is fine for most things).

Introduction to VGALIB

During the Christmas break of 2018 I started working on a cross-platform video library that would work on DOS, Linux, and Web. The idea was really born from tinkering with some old C++ code that found on an old hard drive.

I wrote my first C++ code in 1995 in Borland C++ 3.1 on my old DOS computer. When I was a Junior in High School [ca 1993] I was part of what they call a “coding bootcamp” today. There were 2 Support Engineers from Borland, Tom Orsi and Jeff Peters, and they volunteered to teach a small group of HS students how to program in C. Most, but not all of us, had prior programming experience in another language. My experience was with Microsoft QBasic, Visual Basic for DOS, and Visual Basic 3.0 for Windows.