In March 1987 Colin created The Jungle, an electronic community for
Penn & Teller. It was a electronic mail center, handling private
messages as well as public discussion messages. He wrote it in
Turbo Pascal 3.0, and ran it on an IBM PC XT/286. The Jungle replaced the
electronic mail program that was included with PC Remote, software
published by DCA, the makers of CrossTalk.
Over time an offline reader was added to the package, and in the early nineties the public discussion messages were set up to be digested and sent out to some participants in regular Internet mail. When it became clear that there were better mail clients and mail solutions, the Jungle's original software was shut down, and the public discussion ran briefly on some outsourced C++ code. That was short lived. It broke too much and Colin wasn't involved enough in the architecture of the solution.
The Rewrite: So Colin created the entire system again, this time with Claris Emailer, Apple's own HyperCard, and a couple of little AppleScripts that connected the two. It has handled tens of thousands of messages in the current configuration, which has run since 1997 with few changes. It runs on an Apple iMac, a fruit-colored one from the old days, running the MacOS version 8.1. It is fed bandwidth by FIOS in a little room off a garage.
The total code for the HyperCard portion of the solution is less than 100k of HyperTalk scripts. HyperTalk is a beautiful message-centric object-oriented language.
Eventually the idea of The Jungle went public with tightcircle, technology which resulted in a a patent being issued to Colin.