Blue Wave - History

History

Blue Wave was released to the public September 20, 1990 by Fred Rappuhn and George Hatchew, and marketed via their company, Blue Wave Software. Fred Rappuhn and George Hatchew were fellow Sysops who met at a picnic for local area Sysops. During this picnic, the concept of Blue Wave was born and development was started immediately. Fred Rappuhn concentrated on the offline reader while George Hatchew concentrated on the doors that would convert the BBS message system to a Blue Wave format. This packet could then be downloaded and read offline by the Blue Wave Reader. It quickly gained success and soon became one of the top offline mail readers available. This team proved to be very successful and within a short amount of time had support for all the top BBS systems.

Another offline mail packet format called QWK was created in 1987, but did not gain a wide following until much later. Blue Wave became fairly popular in the early 1990s, as at the time QWK was generally limited to PCBoard systems, on which it was based. However, new QWK "doors" for other popular BBS systems soon appeared and its popularity grew considerably. The Blue Wave client software was then adapted to allow it to read and write QWK as well as Blue Wave files.

Fred Rappuhn was hired as a programmer by EDS in September 1991 and soon was unable to continue development for Blue Wave Software. Blue Wave Software dissolved and George Hatchew started Cutting Edge Computing to continue the development of Blue Wave. Hatchew was later involved in a serious car accident, and was unable to continue development of the system past 1993.

Like QWK, Blue Wave message files consisted of a selection of seemingly randomly named files. Messages themselves were stored in the main .DAT file, supported by an information file and a file containing the headers for each message, and a pointer to the body in the DAT.

Blue Wave packet format has also been supported by other offline mail readers such as BlueMail, MultiMail, and Wolverine.