| Blue wave was an offline mail reader (a program that lets you download messages from a board's local or echomail areas, and upload your replies. This prevented the user from tying up the bbs' phoneline for the hours that a user might take to read and reply to new mail on several echonets.) that used the popular offline mail standard, QWK. Later versions of bluewave supported more advanced functions that required the sysop to install a Bluewave door instead of using the QWK function that most bbs softwares have hardcoded in. (for example, the ability to filter (or twit) messages before downloading.) However, as the bluewave reader was shareware, a registered copy had to be purchased to access these enhanced features, so most users stuck with the perfectly adequate QWK packets. Or (sigh..) read their mail online. A distinctive feature of messages posted by users of bluewave was that it appended one or two more informational lines to the end of the message. Usually there are one or two: a tearline, starting with ---, with information about the bbs software, and an Origin line, starting with * Origin:, which contained routing information for echomail software. Bluewave (and other OLRs) adds two more: another tearline starting with ___ naming the offline mail software, and a tagline, starting with ..., which users would fill in with a signature or a joke. Hardcore bluewave users would have a file of thousands of taglines and have the program choose one at random. |
