I indirectly caused the Telegard 2.5g code to be leaked to the world. At no point was this distribution of code authorized to have been sent to anyone other than a few friends of Eric Oman's, which at the time included myself. The odd thing about it was that I had stopped getting the most recent distribution of the source code. Martin Pollard had convinced Eric Oman to rewrite all of Telegard in C/C++. Mr. Pollard was a programmer in "real life" and the rest of us were just kids in high school, or amazingly enough in Eric's case, Junior High School.

Mr. Pollard wanted to have Telegard shed its BBS kiddie image (which is similar to the script kiddie image that exists nowadays). None of us really fit that stereotype, but we "risked" fitting it. So, Telegard 2.5g (or whatever version it is) was old code.

Well, I was proud that I had it. I was relatively unimportant to "the team," but I was allowed the chance to contribute. So, I had the source code backed up. Three or four times. It took up two whole floppy disks, wow. Sooo big! Two 360k floppies of Turbo Pascal source, compressed! I used a popular "file split" tool called TheMove (written by a friend of mine) to stick it on floppies, and would occasionally show it off to friends of mine. I mean, I was part of the Telegard programming team... Isn't that cool? And the new Alt-F9 feature was mine, aren't I sweet?

Friend of mine swiped those disks. See, he and I argued about which was better TAG or Telegard. Might as well have been vi vs emacs or any number of other holy wars. Neither was going to win. For some godforsaken reason, he had honestly thought that by distributing the source code that the BBS would die.

I think the only thing that happened out of that, apart from the birth of Renegade BBS out of that source, is that some of the backdoors got taken out. I don't think anyone ever discovered the backdoors apart from Cott Lang. I never found them, and I had the source code, and I had looked for that sort of thing. Eric hid them real well.

The other thing that came out of it is that Telegard is still alive, with a new author. I later called Carl Mueller and Eric Oman when I discovered that I was the cause, and found out how the disks got distributed. (Neither of them were very much interested in what happened to their code -- an attitude which puzzles me to this day.)

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