Today In History V1.0 by Jon Radoff
-----------------------------------

This is a Today in history program which may be used to give something
interesting to look at while you are booting up your system, or as a
a text file which could be displayed on a bulletin board system.

This program uses data files which are based on a data format 
and content used by Patrick Kincaid in his program TODAY-PC.

To run Today in History, you need to have previously assigned a logical
directory named "TODAY:" and have put all of the data files in this
directory.  The data files it will be looking for are the Today.* files
(where * is all the three letter month extenders, such as AUG for August).

Just type "Today" at the CLI or have the command executed in a script file.
Today in History will then think for a few seconds, and then display some
text outlining a bunch of important dates from history that happened on the
same date as today.

To run Today in History in a BBS environment, you'll need to have a way to
execute a script file at a daily maintenance time...  With the Paragon BBS
system, this is easily done by editing your event scheduler accordingly to
add a script file which is run around midnight.  This script file should
contain a couple of lines somewhat like this:

assign TODAY: dh1:today              ;Assign Today's logical directory
Today >dh1:bbs/bulletins/Bul3.TXT    ;Redirect Today's screen to bulletin #3

To add a date to Today In History's data files, find the file which you
need to add the date to by looking at the Today data file extenders (AUG for
August, SEP for September, etc).

You may then add a line in the following format:

S06071839 The Hawaiian Declaration of Rights is signed.
^ ^ ^  ^ ^ ^
| | |  | | |
| | |  | | +- The text to be displayed on this date.
| | |  | |
| | |  | +- Qualifier field (*)
| | |  |
| | |  +- Year.  Put in leading zeros if less than the year 1000.
| | |
| | +- Day of the month, requires leading 0 if it is less than 10.
| |
| +- Month, requires leading 0 if it is less than 10.
|
+- A character which may be '*', 'S', 'R', or 'B'.  Anything starting with a
   '*' is ignored.  'S' means the date is a special event.  'R' means it is
   an annual type event (like a holiday).  'B' means it is a birthday.

 * The qualifier field is normally a space, however, it may be a few other
   things as well:  When it is the letter "C", it means that it is a
   continuation from the previous date, so the year field should not be
   redisplayed.  It may also be a number from 0 to 6 for a day of the week
   on which this will only be shown on (0 is Sunday, 1 is Monday, etc.).
   See the November data file to see some good examples of this (it shows
   how the U.S. Election Day can be correctly determined).


This is another public domain utility by myself...  So far, my only other
PD program for the Amiga is ParseLst, the Amiga version of the popular
MS-DOS FidoNet nodelist compiler.

Also, don't miss the Paragon BBS system, coming very soon.  Zmodem with
CRC-32, batch, and resume, full FidoNet support, online Doors, and much more.


I may be contacted in the following ways:

PLINK:     Jon Radoff
BBS:       508/393-3875
FidoNet:   Jon Radoff @ 1:322/545 
US Mail:   Jon Radoff, 18 Charina Road, Northboro, MA 01532


NOTE.... I started writing this program myself and compiling a massive
database to go along with it. One of my users mentioned that TODAY already
existed... and since it was as friendly as it was... I decided to just
incorporate MY database with his. Thanks Jon!!!

Chuck Maier
TAG BBS 302-764-3186