A year ago today (January 25th, 200
, I released the first beta version of D-RATS. It was version 0.1.1 and was posted for early testing with my local ARES group. I had been working on the code for about a week at that time and had just gotten enough working (about 1,900 lines of code) that I felt it was worth testing. Soon after that, I released 0.1.2, which I considered the first non-beta version. Interestingly enough, the screenshot at the top of the D-RATS page is still of version 0.1.2…I should probably update that soon!
Anyway, 0.1.1 was interesting because it represented a lot of firsts. It was my first GUI Python program, and the first time I had used PyGTK. It was my first attempt at a Windows application (well, since Visual Basic back in middle school) and certainly my first time trying to package a Python program with Py2EXE. It was also my first attempt at implementing the XMODEM protocol, which I thought was how I would do file transfers over the radio. Since then, it has become obvious that XMODEM (and variants) won’t work because the radio is not 8-bit safe.
Now a year (and 30 releases) later, D-RATS has grown much larger than I had ever imagined (about 16,500 lines) and does things I never anticipated when I started. Who knows where we’ll be on January 25th, 2010!