Super cool. At first I was thinking QModem was the name of an old protocol (like XModem, YModem, ZModem) because it has been so long, but it sounded so familiar. I googled for images and boom - there it is, my childhood. I spent so many hours in this program, and what a great time I had dialing all my local BBSs and downloading all sorts of programs via ZModem on my 14.4K modem. Thank you, Aaron, for making this little piece of my childhood available for inspection and posterity. And may John RIP.
Update: it is also neat it was written in Pascal which was my 2nd language and holds a special place in my heart. I realized early on that BASIC was not ideal for writing professional programs and hadn't yet moved on to C, so Pascal had my attention for a number of years as a teenager.
I also completely forgot that Qmodem isn't the protocol but the software. My first PC was an IBM XT 8088 with 20MB HD and 2400 baud modem. Twice as fast as a 1200 baud and the number of floppy disks it could fit in that hard drive!
Now also remembering we could assign macros on Qmodem to function keys. That let us automate playing games like Trade Wars. I'll be honest and say we were using it to also pirate games like Space Quest, Ultima, Leisure Suit Larry.
I remember once a month the the ABBL(Atlanta Bulletin Board List) would come out and my father would download and print it at work because we didn't have a printer. He'd come home with a reem of green striped tractor feed paper and I would scour over it transferring annotations from the previous list and making note of new boards to try.
Atlanta during the BBS era must have been paradise. It had the largest local free calling zone of anywhere in the US. Where I lived, the town on the other side of the interstate was in-state long distance, so we were confined to the BBSes in our little suburb plus the nearby "big city" of about 100k people.
Maybe some places like the Bay Area and New York City had more local BBSes but it wouldn't surprise me if Atlanta was in the top five or even the top given the huge free calling zone.
The SF Bay Area was probably full of BBSes, as was the Los Angeles Area, but we had Inter-LATA or 'Zone 3' calling for stuff where the central office was I think more than 15 miles away, but under some limit. Closer rate centera than that was local, farther would go through your long distance carrier. Unlimited local calling was available at a reasonable price, but Zone3 was still charged per minute (could cost more than some long distance carriers)
Update: it is also neat it was written in Pascal which was my 2nd language and holds a special place in my heart. I realized early on that BASIC was not ideal for writing professional programs and hadn't yet moved on to C, so Pascal had my attention for a number of years as a teenager.