Torfs Tom wrote in a message to All:

 TT> Roy,

 tt> ___ SoupGate-Win32 v1.05

>I take it that's some reference to "soup packets"?  I
remember seeing some
>mention of those with regard to fidonet-internet gating,  but never really
>got any sort of a grasp on what they were all about.

 TT> SOUP (Simple Offline Usenet Packet format, see 
 TT> http://combee.techwood.org/old/soup12.html) was developed to store 
 TT> Usenet newsgroups and e-mail offline, similar to the way it's done 
 TT> in Fidonet. This makes it useful as an intermediate format for 
 TT> Fido Internet gating. At first I just wrote the SoupGate 
 TT> software to gate FidoSOUP, and then another program (such as 
 TT> Souper) was needed to transport the SOUP packets from/to the 
 TT> actual Internet. Later on I also wrote Spoon to do the actual 
 TT> talking to POP3/ SMTP/NTTP servers.

Thanks for the explanation,  I'd missed that somewhere along the way... :-)

 TT> The latest real update to this software dates from 1999, right now 
 TT> it is just happily doing its gating business without human 
 TT> intervention. 

I like stuff that does that.  Here I run GIGO,  which has no continuing
support or update either,  and while it's sometimes a real job trying to
figure out how to do something,  for the most part it just keeps on going, 
and I don't have to worry about it.

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