>I am curious about how OAT fared compared to HDS. My bet is that lots >more people saw (see) the worth of HDS.
Hi Jim, Some details for you regarding OAT. As you may be aware, OAT was our first utility and was originally called "MaxTF." We spent over 18 months developing what we thought was a really great addition to the TeleFinder system, and it offered several major improvements and new features to what was, and still is, the industry leader in BBS design and functionality.
During the public development phase we had as many as 45 Sysops running the beta. We were constantly "tweaking" or adding more functions until we decided to stop the beta phase. At that point we felt the utility had reached a stage that warranted a release. We subsequently released OAT 2.0. The extra features held over were, and still are, planned for version 2.5
Ver 2 of OAT added some 20 extra or improved features to Telefinder and we set 2 prices targeted at those sysops who ran a club bbs and those who ran commercial bbs's. Regretfully a lot of the sysops who were more than willing to use OAT in its development phase felt we were asking to much and at this time we have less than 10 sysops using OAT, therfore further mainstream development of OAT is not likly at this time but I must stress this would change if sysops wanted more features.
As you mentioned some of the features were not quite straight forward to implement but one of my favourite was 'Mail Compression', this would save as much as 60% transfer time for mail and tfnet traffic. On several occasion we asked Rusty if he would be willing to run it on Spiderisland as an example to others but he was more interested in getting HDS Webmail online.
