Recommended software

To get the most out of Eye Of The Beholder you'll need, in almost every case, a client suited to the channel through which you connect. This isn't a whim of ours: it's that each route in -the BBS over telnet or SSH, the FidoNet node, reading echomail as a point, IRC, FTP, newsgroups- speaks its own protocol, and the generic clients shipped with your operating system don't always speak it well. A standard telnet client, for example, will let you connect to the BBS, but it will show you broken colours, the extended characters of code page 437 as unreadable symbols, and ANSI art turned into alphabet soup. A modern mail reader will show you an echomail message without understanding its FTN headers or its tearline. And so on.

In this section you'll find a selection of recommendations, grouped by access channel and, within each channel, by operating system. They aren't the only possible options -in the retrocomputing world the alternatives multiply-, but they are the ones the SysOp has tested, uses, or recommends with first-hand knowledge, and the ones that make for an experience close to what you'd have had if you'd sat down at the console thirty years ago, only without the modem's screech.

If you find some client missing, use one that doesn't appear in the list and would like to recommend it, or have doubts about which one to choose for your particular case, write me a netmail, an email, or leave me a message on the BBS: the list is kept alive precisely thanks to that kind of input.