[TimeCapsule] TBConn (connection log utils)

Information

This project is a so called Time Capsule Project, which means that it is a project which I made way back in the earlier days of my programming. Most of these project had never seen the ‘daylight of the internet’ and I thought it would be fun to have a small ‘glimpse back into the past’ on some of my older projects. You can read more about the XNL Future Technologies Time Capsule here.

This one in particular are four small executables which could be used to log the connection state/result for a util called RASDAIL95 which was made by Claudio Fahey. I personally never used these utils to be honest, but my father requested me to make these small utils to be able to log the connection results for his mail server which he was using back then. This was a Mercury Mail Server developed by David Harris which my father ran on a Windows 98 Second Edition machine. As far as I can remember he also shared these four utils with quite a few other users whom used this mail server with RASDAIL95 back then. Today I still don’t know how they exactly configured RASDAIL95 to use my utils to log the connection states 😂, but I do know they worked as he (and the other users) wanted them to work, and that’s all that counts right😉?

The utils work as follows:
tbconna.exe Outputs: Aborted by user 22:03:33 06-25-2000
tbconnc.exe Outputs: Connected 22:03:33 06-25-2000
tbconnd.exe Outputs: Disconnected 22:03:33 06-25-2000
tbconnf.exe Outputs: Connection failure 22:03:33 06-25-2000

These results would be written to CONLOG.TXT

Where the abbreviated filenames meant:
TBConnAborted.exe
TBConnConnected.exe
TBConnDisconnected.exe
TBConnFailure.exe

What does the TB stand for in the project/util name?
TB stood for The Boss and/or TB Software Corp. A nickname I used way back in those days. You can actually read more about that on the XNL Future Technologies Time Capsule Page here if you would like.

(Probably) written in QBasic for MS-DOS and never published online
These four small utils where probably written in QBasic for MS-DOS (I don’t even remember for sure anymore though, and don’t have their source code either anymore unfortunately)

2024 (Re-Release) Update
I did not changed anything to these little utils at all for this ‘official public release’ finally after a whopping 24 years😳 (as of 2024). I did however only redacted the personal (outdated) email information from the TBConn.txt which was the ‘official release document’ back then (which is also included in the download/zip-file).

No source code available
Sorry, but if you where hoping to see or get the source code of these little tools, then I would have to disappoint you. Unfortunately I’ve lost the source-code many years ago (as you can read on the XNL Future Technologies Time Capsule Information Page), due to this only the binaries can be downloaded.

Why are there no screenshots of the tools themselves?
Well simple: They don’t have any user interface 😂. They are just simple executables which output a ‘preset text’, date and time to the log file and that’s it. Which is also the reason why there are only two ‘demo screenshots’: One showing the utils being started from the command line, and one where you can view the contents of the log with Edit for MS-DOS.

Want to try (or even use) these ‘vintage utils’ of mine?
You can still use them on most computer running Operating systems like MS-DOS, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP etc. As long as it’s either a 16-bit or 32-bit (Microsoft) operating system. They will no longer work on full 64 Bit systems like Windows 10 for example.

Q: What about other operating systems like Windows Vista, Windows 7 etc?
A: I literally have no freaking clue if they (still?) work on those Windows versions, never tested them on those, and probably won’t even use them at all anymore these days 😉