REPLY: 1:18/200.0 606d3d06   
   MSGID: 3:633/267 606ec7ac   
   CHRS: LATIN-1 2   
   TZUTC: 1000   
   TID: hpt/fbsd 1.9.0-cur 2021-04-01   
   On 2021-04-07 00:03:02, Sean Dennis (1:18/200) wrote to Kai Richter:   
      
    SD> The author, David Nugent (who also wrote the BNU FOSSIL driver, I   
    SD> believe), was pissed that so many people used his program and never   
    SD> registered it.  I have seen the original message where he told people   
    SD> off and then said he was leaving the BBS scene forever.   
      
   PKT inspection was always an extremely niche feature, though. The number of   
   sysops who actually needed specialised software to look at PKTs on a regular   
   basis would've only been in the hundreds at best. So his target audience was   
   always going to be pretty small from the start, and it's telling that (to my   
   knowledge) nobody's written a similar program just to do that one thing,   
   without the file manager part. There just wasn't the demand for it.   
      
   I'm not sure InspectA had much else going for it. As a file manager it was a   
   bit mediocre. I suspect that was the main reason more people didn't pay for it.   
      
   InspectA 1.1 was released in 1993. There was already competition from   
   XTreeGold & Norton Commander, both of which were already extremely popular   
   (and also heavily pirated!) and arguably far superior.   
      
   But by 1997 he was fighting a losing battle on a few fronts:   
      
   There were now stable versions of ZTreeBold & File Commander/2, both very   
   faithful shareware OS/2 clones of XTreeGold & Norton Commander.   
      
   The demise of FidoNet had already begun. Its peak was two years earlier. A lot   
   of BBSes had already closed.   
      
   There was also a big increase of free software in FidoNet. For example Maximus   
   and Squish, which ironically David himself worked on, and both of which were   
   later open-sourced.   
      
   Then there was a big increase in open source FidoNet software. Msged was a   
   good example, and was something I contributed to intermittantly between   
   1995-1998. It competed with the shareware version of GoldED, and ultimately   
   probably contributed to its open-sourcing. In 2021 open source software in   
   FidoNet is completely normal, and probably runs on the majority of FidoNet   
   nodes.   
      
   Outside of FidoNet the popularity of Windows 95 also signalled the demise of   
   text-mode apps like InspectA or XTreeGold, or GoldED. They still ran under   
   Windows 95 but often not very well, or lacked good OS integration (clipboard   
   support, long filenames...). There was also never a 32-bit Windows version of   
   InspectA, which I thought was a strange omission.   
      
   --- GoldED+/BSD 1.1.5-b20180707   
    * Origin: Blizzard of Ozz, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia (3:633/267)   
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