I've been running a SynchroNet node for a few years now but accessing the Bulletin Board System from a mobile device isn't convenient or even very friendly. The screen ratio of a 80x25 terminal just doesn't match modern day screens without needing to squint or pan.
As it happens I've been using Anthropic's Claude AI coder tool to help with some other projects so I figured what would happen if I left Claude to its own devices to implement a bink protocol in PHP? I've been wanting to automate posting of certain reports to some echomail areas and I thought it would be fun to see what it came up with. After all, how is a modern AI going to fair with a 30+ year old technology (Fidonet being from the 1980s!).
Right out of the gate Claude built a web interface for netmail and echomail, along with a binkley protocol implementation for polling and standalone server. After a few rounds of trouble shooting packet formats and other annoying bugs I was able to get the basic system up and running as a point system hanging off my bulletin board system. Within a day!
Over the past few weeks I've been working with Claude to refine the system. The system has now been expanded to support:
- installable web app on desktop and mobile for quick and speedy access
- custom font and size for reading making plaintext much simpler to read on tiny screens
- article sharing (internally and externally)
- a node list browser
- support threaded echomail views
- more comprehensive Fidonet support including support for INTL and REPLYTO kludge lines
- an addressbook
- registration system to allow others to apply to use the system.
and long term I hope to see it support multiple networks, and I'm pretty curious about using it in a Point to Point mode where two systems can communicate directly without the need for a boss node.
All in all I'm pretty amused and happy with the outcome and it's been a great experiment at building a system from scratch using so-called "Vibe coding".
The project is also open source and licensed under a BSD license. The github repo lives at https://github.com/awehttam/binkterm-php
