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The History of Online Assistant for TeleFinder

Online Assistant for TeleFinder is a product born out of the need for extra features for both TeleFinder BBS users and sysops.

The original MaxTF product (version one) was developed by Glenn Stewart of the Association Mac BBS. Glenn has since moved on to web-publishing, and sold the rights of his original product to Highlander Data Systems.

The original MaxTF Utilities featured a File Search Engine, an NNTP Server, an FTP client and caller log generator. However, since these were implemented individually using a mixture of Future Basic and AppleScript, it was decided that the same concepts should be re-introduced in a complete integrated package. Thus MaxTF Utilities Version Two was created.

The new version has been written entirely in C++ by Jonathan Paisley using CodeWarrior and Symantec C++.

Development started at the beginning of 1996, and since then has gone through a number of public beta releases. We suffered an unfortunate setback in autumn 1996 when our primary hard drive crashed, losing the source to the most recent release of the OAT application. As such, we were forced to update an older version to provide the same feature set as the later release. This recovery has taken some time, especially since OAT is a hobby project that I develop in my spare time.

Prior to its final release, MaxTF Utilities (the application) underwent a name change to 'Online Assistant for TeleFinder' (OAT).


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