In the summer of 1993 I started working on what would become the most important program I ever wrote.
Before I get to that, let me start with some backstory.
Backstory
I got my first modem in late 1991. It was a Hayes SmartModem 1200 that was donated to me by one of my Dad’s coworkers that had upgraded to a faster 2400 baud model.
Before this I had never gone online at all. Modems were still somewhat expensive and online time even more so. For you youngsters out there, this was before the World Wide Web. There was no cohesive “internet”, and the parts of it that were available were really was only accessible by some businesses and universities. Going online for regular folks involved a variety of proprietary services that didn’t talk to each other (CompuServe, GEnie, Delphi) and that were all rather expensive, with prices up to $12/hour.1
At first I signed up for a relatively new serice called GEnie, created by General Electric. They had recently lowered their prices a lot. You could no access some parts of GEnie for free (generic message boards, mostly). Using the more interesting parts, such as special interest groups (called RoundTables) with bulletin boards, email and downloads cost about $6/hour. In 1992, GEnie was the home of Atari’s online presence.
I also used another service called Delphi, which I generally preferred. Its Atari section was run by former ANALOG and ST Log staffers and I liked the way it worked better than GEnie. Plus Delphi had a really great deal where you could get 20 hours of time for just $20. I forget what extra hours cost, but they were reasonable for the time.
By 1993 I was going online a lot and quickly using up my hours. Reading messages while connected was expensive! Downloading a single file could take 20 minutes or more depending on its size.
Worse still, the landline was used to go online. Most homes (and apartments) had a just a single landline to share with everyone living there. Going online could prevent others from using the phone for a long time. And it would prevent others from being able to call you as well. There was no voice mail back then.
Call waiting was a new phone feature that would emit short blips in the audio of your call if another call was coming it. You could then press a phone button to switch between the callers. This call waiting feature would cause havoc when you were online as the “blip” would often cause garbage to get transmitted or worse, cause you to get disconnected. Call waiting was almost always displayed (with *70) before making the phone call to the online service.
To connect to an online service, you used an app called a “terminal program”. It was called a terminal program because it behaved as a terminal into the online service that you called.
The terminal program would dial the number, get you connected and then let you type commands to the service and view its responses which at 1200 baud would scroll across the screen, not very quickly, in realtime.
As I recall I had been using something called Freeze Dried Terminal on my Mega STE, but I found someone (on Delphi) that was selling their copy of STalker, a terminal program sold by Gribnif. Freeze Dried Terminal was not a GEM program, but STalker was a full GEM program and could even run in the background!
I believe I paid $20 for my used copy of STalker and contacted Gribnif to get the license transferred to me, which they happily did2.
Like many terminal programs, STalker had its own way to automate things. Usually this was in the form of some sort of macro system, but STalker had a full-featured programming language called BackTALK!


I realized that I could create a program that ran within STalker to automate my online usage. In particular I wanted to be able to have something log in and download email messages, bulletin board (BB) posts and download files all at once. Plus do the reverse and upload email, BB posts and files.
I decided I would create such a program for Delphi for a couple reasons. First, I used Delphi the most. And second, GEnie already had a free program, called Aladdin, that could do many of these things.
So in August 1993 I started on my STalker program. Because this program was going to work with Delphi, I had the bright idea to call it “Oracle” as in the “Oracle of Delphi”. I had no idea there was a very large company by that name — oops!
I want to take a moment to welcome the many new readers that arrived via the recent ST Book article. The rest of this 2800-word article is for paid subscribers, but if you’d like another taste of Goto 10, check out this other free post: