C, SMTP, POP, aggressively portable cross-platform programming
I was an early member of the engineering team at this e-mail technology startup. I ultimately supervised four Unix programmers and coordinated eight projects. I was responsible for cross-platform portability coordination with other project managers (Macintosh and Windows). I wrote Z-Mail Lite, the curses-based character-terminal interface to Z-Code's award-winning e-mail client Z-Mail.
Because I was constrained, for portability reasons, to programming in C and I needed to write object-oriented code, I created SPOOR, an object-oriented framework for C code that provided single inheritance of data and methods, polymorphism, and a metacircular class system. Using SPOOR I created the SPOOR Widget Set, a set of curses-based widgets that roughly paralleled the Motif widget set. It included full-featured editable text widgets, list widgets, modal and modeless dialogs, pull-down and pop-up menus, and context-based configurable keybindings. The manual for SPOOR is here. The code is preserved here.
Z-Code unwisely undertook to add proprietary extensions to the POP3 mail-retrieval protocol. This misguided effort nevertheless contained some really cool technology: to wit, an algorithm for efficiently computing the differences between the server copy and the local copy of a mailbox. I implemented the algorithm and wrote this document describing it.
I created several suites of reusable software components that appeared in all other projects at Z-Code, including a library of assorted data structures; an automatic garbage collector; an exception-handling system featuring TRY-FINALLY, TRY-EXCEPT, and RAISE constructs; and a general-purpose MIME parser.