This repository is about today, a small utility saved from Usenet
years ago. It reads a per-month data file and prints any birthdays,
historical events, and reminders attached to the current date. This
document is a research log assembled while trying to establish who wrote
it and how it has propagated since.
Original files: the unmodified today.c source and today.1–
today.12 data files, exactly as originally saved, are in
today/.
Recovered shareware ZIPs: original DOS-era TODAY distribution
archives, found during this research, are preserved as-downloaded in
zips/, each documented with its source URL and checksum in
zips/README.md.
Building: the original source doesn't compile clean on modern compilers without changes — see BUILDING.md for the compiler flags that get a clean build without touching the source, and for a known bug in the original code.
Leo Bicknell: personal note — I found this code in a very old git repository. This was one of the few bits of code that I did not write that I felt like saving at the time. Most likely I saved the original copy in 1993-1996, but the exact date is lost. When I found the code I realized it had no history of where it came from or who wrote it.
Using Claude.AI to assist in the searching, I set off to see if I could find the true sources. It was a fascinating step back into computer history that most have forgotten. I decided my research needed to be shared when I realized several of the key individuals are no longer with us. I hope by publishing this now they can get some eternal recognition for their contribution.
On how I likely got my own copy (relevant to TODO.md item 11's open question about why this repo's
today.chas no version banner or lunar-phase code): I was briefly into the BBS scene and may have seenTODAYon one or more boards, but the files in this archive date from my college years, when I was doing everything on Ultrix or NetBSD machines. It's quite likely I went looking for a Unix port of the software, or ran across one on a newsgroup — that would explain a bare Unix C reader with none of the DOS-specific version banner or copyright strings every recovered DOS release has. There's even a very small chance I wrote the reader myself, though I really don't think that's the case.
As with any piece of folk history, the trail is a mix of hard evidence and inference. This note tries to keep the two apart: Verified claims are backed by a primary or independently-corroborated source, cited inline. Speculation is labeled as such, with the reasoning laid out so a future researcher can judge it for themselves.
The program was written by Patrick Kincaid, in Datalight C, in July 1986.
This is stated directly by a TODAY.DOC file recovered from a preserved
Acorn/RISC OS BBS archive — the original author's own documentation for
the program, distributed alongside it:
TODAY/PC was written in Datalight C for IBM PC compatible systems by Patrick Kincaid in July of 1986. It was inspired by a program originally written by Mike Butler in PL/1 on an IBM VM/CMS system. He should be credited with the original concept and the bulk of the wonderful data in the files. You will notice a distinct San Francisco flavor to the databases. Who says programs can't have class?
The same document gives Kincaid's contact details for submitting new trivia entries:
Patrick Kincaid 618 Douglas Drive Mill Valley, CA 94941
and names his distribution channel as the "Marin-Sonoma PC User Group BBS (415) 927-1216" — a Marin County (San Francisco Bay Area) dial-up BBS, consistent with the document's own admission of a "distinct San Francisco flavor" in the data.
The data file format matches this specification exactly. TODAY.DOC
lays out the record layout column-by-column (record type in column 1, a
MMDD date, a 4-digit year, a continuation/day-of-week flag, then the
message text). The local today.c and today.N files parse records in
exactly this layout, down to the C-for-continuation convention seen
throughout the data (e.g. B01101877 / B01101877C... in
today.1).
The dataset contains a self-referential entry for its own author,
matching a known birthdate. today.6 (June) contains the line:
B06281947 Patrick Kincaid, send him a card.
— June 28, 1947. This is very likely the compiler including his own
birthday in his own database, a common in-joke among BBS-era data
curators. The same line (with the year rendered in parentheses) appears
independently in a GNU gcal data file derived from this dataset — see
Section III — confirming it isn't an artifact introduced locally.
The same file also contains a self-referential milestone entry, and it
is now independently confirmed. today.6 contains the line:
S06051981 TODAY ran for 1st time
June 5, 1981 — five years before Kincaid's stated 1986 PC port, and
consistent with TODAY.DOC's claim that the program was "inspired by a
program originally written by Mike Butler in PL/1 on an IBM VM/CMS
system." A Facebook post from the UTMBiology page (University of Toronto
Mississauga — known as Erindale College in 1981) independently states,
under the heading "#OnThisDay 1981":
World's first today in history program with editable data "TODAY", invented by Michael Butler runs for the first time on a mainframe computer
— posted June 5, 2019 by UTMBiology
(live post;
archived screenshot: screenshots/utmbiology-facebook-2019-06-05.png).
This independently corroborates three things at once: the June 5, 1981
date, the "editable data" design (matching TODAY.DOC's description of
the customizable per-month files), and — critically — gives Butler's full
first name, Michael Butler, and ties him to the University of Toronto
(Mississauga campus, then Erindale College). This program's mainframe
original almost certainly ran there.
The program went through at least five documented revisions between 1986 and 1993, and lost its lunar-phase feature somewhere along the way. Usenet and Fidonet archives turn up three later snapshots of Kincaid's own DOS executable, each printing its own version/copyright banner as part of its output:
- A post to
rec.org.sca("[GENERAL INFO] Medieval News Of The Day," by Jerod Husvar, Aug 10, 1995) shows a modified copy printingTODAY Version 3.1 09/01/90 Copyright 1986,88,90 By Patrick Kincaid— the copyright years matching an update in 1986, 1988, and 1990, literally. - A
comp.os.msdospost ("Old TODAY/PC program by Patrick Kincaid, 1986?", Andy Ziem, Sept 15, 2001) reproduces that same v3.1 (09/01/90) banner and output as an example of a version he already had — but Ziem was specifically hunting for a copy of the original 1986 release, because it reported the phase of the moon and his own copy, v3.3 (1993), did not. - A
fido7.moscow-oklahompost (Gary Baumgartner, Jan 14–22, 2004) shows a further revision:TODAY Version 3.6 11/14/93 Copyright 1986, 1993 By Patrick Kincaid.
Together these give a version timeline: 1986 (v1.0, the original) → 1988
(v2.0, then v2.1) → 1990 (v3.1, still circulating unchanged among SCA
users as late as 1995) → 1993 (v3.3, lunar phase already gone by the time
Ziem got a copy) → November 14, 1993 (v3.6, still circulating on Fidonet
as late as 2004). Two of these releases — v1.0 and v2.1 — have since been
directly recovered (below), and neither shows any trace of a lunar-phase
feature in doc or executable, so "1986 (original, with lunar phase)" is
likely a misremembering on Ziem's part rather than a real feature that
was later removed. Notably, this repository's own
today.c has no version number and prints no copyright
banner at all, even though its accompanying data files — see below — turn
out to be an exact copy of Kincaid's original 1986 v1.0 databases. Why a
data snapshot from that specific moment would be paired with a reader
that never had (or had already lost) the version-banner code seen in
every surviving DOS release remains an open question. See
TODO.md.
Real, complete copies of v3.1, v3.3, v3.4, v3.5, and v3.6 have now all
been recovered, downloaded, and read in full. TODAY31.ZIP and
TODAY36.ZIP came from the Internet Archive
(msdos_festival_TODAY31,
TODAY36_ZIP); TODAY34.ZIP
from a surviving BBS file archive at
bbs.retropc.se;
TODAY33.ZIP and TODAY35.ZIP — versions not referenced in any prior
source in this research — were found via
discmaster.textfiles.com, a search
engine indexing filenames (and contents) across roughly 1.6 billion
files from thousands of dumped shareware CD-ROMs, BBS archives, and old
FTP mirrors, which also turned up dozens more circulating copies of
files already in hand (9 further copies of TODAY36.ZIP alone, plus 29
of TODAYDOR.ZIP and 26 of TODAYBBS.ZIP — see below). All five are
preserved in this repository under zips/, each with its
source URL and checksum recorded in zips/README.md
(the two archive.org copies were verified against the MD5 checksums in
their own item metadata). Between them these are the richest primary
sources recovered in this research. Highlights:
-
A dedicated "TODAY's History" section, in Kincaid's own words — present through v3.1/v3.3/v3.4, dropped starting with v3.5: "This program was written by Patrick Kincaid first in 1986, then updated in 1988 and again in 1990. It was inspired by a program written by Michael Butler on an IBM VM/CMS system in the PL/1 language. Credit for the concept and original data should go to him." This exact paragraph appears word-for-word in
TODAY31.ZIP,TODAY33.ZIP, andTODAY34.ZIP'sTODAY.DOC(in factTODAY33.ZIPandTODAY34.ZIPship the identical, byte-for-byteTODAY.DOC, confirming v3.4 really was a pure bugfix release), independently corroborating the version-history timeline above and — critically — giving Butler's full first name directly from Kincaid himself, not just from the third-party 2019 UTMBiology Facebook post (Section I above). It's gone fromTODAY35.ZIPonward, andTODAY35.ZIP's ownWHATS.NEWexplains why — see below. -
Documentation consistently lags the version number by one release.
TODAY31.ZIP's manual titles itself "Version 3.0";TODAY33.ZIP/TODAY34.ZIP's titles itself "Version 3.3." Both describe the previous release, not the one they ship with — a minor but consistent shareware-doc habit, not an inconsistency in the research. -
The "History" section wasn't specifically cut for v3.6 — it was a casualty of a general documentation rewrite in v3.5.
TODAY35.ZIP'sWHATS.NEWsays so directly: "The documentation has been rewritten and is now somewhat shorter and more concise. WHEN documentation has been made a part of the main document rather than separate" (accounting for whyTODAY35.ZIP/TODAY36.ZIPno longer ship a separateWHEN.DOC).TODAY36.DOCsimply continues this shorter style. -
A different name for the same BBS phone number, now with a specific city — and now confirmed to be a renaming, not two groups.
TODAY34.ZIP's registration section calls Kincaid's distribution channel the "Golden Gate Computer Society Bulletin Board, (415) 927-1216" — the identical phone number thearcbbs-hostedTODAY_DOC(Section I) calls the "Marin-Sonoma PC User Group BBS."TODAY36.DOC(1993) gives a city for it: "I upload the latest version of TODAY to the Golden Gate Computer Society Bulletin Board in Corte Madera, California" (Marin County, next door to Kincaid's own Mill Valley address) — and adds that it ran PCBoard BBS software and hosted a dedicated "TODAY Conference" message area just for the program. A June 16, 1994ba.internetUsenet post by Walter Olson ("Marin: GGCS Internet SIG Meeting") settles it directly: "The Golden Gate Computer Society (formerly the Marin / Sonoma PC Users Group) is starting a new special Interest Group (SIG)..." — one user group, renamed at some point before mid-1994, not two groups sharing a board. The Golden Gate Computer Society is still active today, at ggcs.org — its own "About" page states "We began in 1981, shortly after the first IBM personal computer came to market," matching the founding-era timeline throughout this research, though the site itself doesn't mention Kincaid,TODAY, or its earlier name. As a still-operating 501(c)(3) organization (P.O. Box 150624, San Rafael, CA 94915-0624;sec@ggcs.org/membership@ggcs.org/help@ggcs.org), it's a live outreach lead in its own right — see TODO.md item 18. -
Registration terms, matching the address already known: $10 to register, $15–20 for diskette/manual copies, checks payable to "Patrick Kincaid, 618 Douglas Drive, Mill Valley, CA 94941 USA" — and, in
TODAY31.ZIP's doc, an earlier, informal model predating the fixed prices: "In the past, I said 'don't send money, send dates.'" -
The program's own stated purpose, in Kincaid's words (
TODAY36.DOC, 1993): "I intended it to be a project to learn a new compiler, not a shareware product."TODAY31.ZIP's doc independently confirms the compiler in question changed over time: "The program has been converted to mostly marvelous Turbo C by Borland International" — a move away from the original 1986 Datalight C (Section I) by the time of v3.0. -
A full specification of the data format, more detailed than anything available before: record types
B(Birthday),S(Special/ historical),R(Reminder),F(Fortune Cookie/Thought For The Day — confirming theTODAY.WITformat seen in the pcorner.com finds below),C(Countdown, "not implemented"), and*(comment), plus a day-of-the-week matching flag and a documented "special reminder" date-range syntax. -
TODAY.OWN's actual contents — a short set of sample reminders ("Pay the mortgage!", birthday reminders for fictional family members Daryl, Alyssa, etc.) rather than anything biographical about Kincaid himself. It's exactly 380 bytes, dated August 5, 1990, in every recovered package that includes it (v3.1, v3.4, v3.5, v3.6) — the same unchanged file across at least three years of releases. The two v3.3 copies checked (TODAY33.ZIP, and another independent copy from a different CD-ROM) are both missing it, most likely a repackaging omission specific to whatever distributor/CD-ROM these particular copies passed through, rather than something genuinely absent from Kincaid's original v3.3, given it's present in the version immediately before (v3.1) and the byte-identical v3.4 doc/data that followed it. -
A pattern of user-contributed specialized databases, not just one.
TODAY31.ZIP's doc explains the origin: "I encourage you to create specialized databases, (SPACE.mon, SCIENCE.mon etc) to share with the rest of us" — of which theMUSICdatabase mentioned inTODAY34.ZIP's changelog and readable via a newADDoption (TODAY ADD MUSIC) was evidently one instance. None of these specialized databases have been tracked down yet; see TODO.md. -
The lunar-phase feature is verifiably absent from all seven releases — in both the documentation and the executables themselves. None of the seven manuals mention the moon, lunar phase, or anything similar anywhere.
TODAY31.ZIP'sTODAY.EXEis not compressed, so its embedded strings are directly readable — no "moon," "lunar," or "phase" string appears anywhere in it either. Update (July 2026): the later, LZEXE-compressed executables (TODAY34.ZIP/35/36) have now been decompressed too, viamywave82/unlzexe(a POSIX-ported build of the classicUNLZEXEtool, since all three carry theLZ91signature) — same result, no lunar-phase strings in any of them, and their version banners read directly from the binary:TODAY Version 3.4 01/05/92,TODAY Version 3.5 07/12/92,TODAY Version 3.6 11/14/93. Since the 2001 Usenet poster wanted the original 1986 release specifically for its lunar-phase reporting, and it's already gone by v3.0/3.1 (1990) in both code and documentation, its removal most likely dates to the 1988 update rather than lingering into the 1990s. -
Byte-for-byte confirmation of the Usenet banner.
TODAY31.ZIP's uncompressedTODAY.EXEcontains the literal stringsTODAY Version 3.1 09/01/90andCopyright 1986,88,90 By Patrick Kincaid— an exact match, straight from the binary, for what the Usenet posts in this section quote — plus Kincaid's mailing address embedded directly in the executable. -
All seven recovered DOS releases have now actually been run, in DOSBox, and the easter egg fires on screen exactly as the data predicts every time. With the DOS date set to June 28, each release displays "Happy Birthday to... In 1947 Patrick Kincaid, send him a card..." alongside real historical entries (Henry VIII, Rousseau, Gilda Radner) — full screenshots and a version-by-version breakdown of the UI's evolution (color/clearing added in v3.1; the interactive "enter a new date" loop added in v3.3; a live, behavioral confirmation that v3.3's missing
TODAY.OWNreally does silently drop the "And remember..." reminder section) are in TODO.md item 11.TODAY.DOC's own manual uses "0628" as its example date and remarks "you will see why I used it" — Kincaid was pointing readers at his own joke. v1.0 and v2.1 run in plain monochrome with no color or clearing at all, and the birthday joke there reads only "send him a card." — the "he'll love it." seen from v3.1 onward was a later addition. -
This repository's own data is not merely an early ancestor of this dataset — it is a byte-for-byte, unmodified copy of the original 1986 release. Two earlier, previously-undocumented releases have since been recovered —
TODAY10.ARC(v1.0, 1986/87) andTODAY21.ZIP(v2.1, April 1988), both preserved inzips/— and comparing this repo'stoday.1–today.12against them (after normalizing line endings and the trailing Ctrl-Z padding) resolves the question completely:Compared against Total lines in that version Lines shared with this repo Share of this repo's lines found verbatim TODAY10.ARC(1986/87, v1.0)2,284 2,284 100.0% TODAY21.ZIP(1988, v2.1)1,687 1,681 99.6% TODAY31.ZIP(1990, v3.1)1,932 1,572 68.8% TODAY33.ZIP/TODAY34.ZIP(1991–92)4,508 1,243 54.4% TODAY35.ZIP(1992)4,525 1,212 53.1% Every one of the twelve month files matches exactly — not just in aggregate line count, but file for file (
today.1=TODAY.JAN,today.6=TODAY.JUN, and so on down totoday.12=TODAY.DEC), with identical byte counts and zero diff output once line endings and the DOS end-of-file marker are stripped. This repository's own data files are, in other words, a direct transcription of Kincaid's original 1986 databases — not a later snapshot, not a partial subset, and not independently assembled. (The 6 lines/points of difference against v2.1 are additions v2.1 made, like the two newTODAY.OWN-adjacent self-referential entries documented inzips/README.md; this repo's files don't includeTODAY.OWNat all, only the 12 month files, so those never entered the comparison to begin with.) The declining overlap against every later version (v3.1 onward) simply reflects how much the databases grew release over release, exactly as expected once this repo's copy is understood to be the starting point of that growth rather than a stop somewhere along the way. This resolves TODO.md item 11's central question: this repo'stoday.1–today.12are Patrick Kincaid's original 1986TODAY.JAN–TODAY.DEC, unmodified. The lack of any version banner or lunar-phase code in this repo's owntoday.cremains unexplained — but see immediately below, since even the actual v1.0 executable and doc show no trace of a lunar feature either.
The earliest two releases, TODAY10.ARC (v1.0) and TODAY21.ZIP
(v2.1), confirm several things at once. Both found via
discmaster.textfiles.com and
preserved in zips/ (full details in
zips/README.md):
- Confirms the
.ARC-before-.ZIPhypothesis directly — and that hypothesis, once pushed one step further back, ruled out an even older distribution format too (see TODO.md item 3). PKZIP's format wasn't introduced until 1989, so any Kincaid release from 1986 through 1988 could only have circulated as a.ARCfile — and both v1.0's and v2.1's own documentation say exactly that: "TODAY is distributed as an archive file(TODAY.ARC) and you must have ARC V5.0 or later to extract the required files." (TheTODAY21.ZIPcopy preserved here is a.ZIPonly because whoever curated the CD-ROM it was found on re-packaged the originalTODAY21.ARCat some point — the file timestamps inside are unchanged from the original 1988 dates. That re-zipping used PKZIP's old "Reducing" method for 4 of its 16 members, a scheme so obscure that neither Info-ZIP,p7zip,unar, nor the current official 7-Zip 26.02 could decode it — only Hans Wennborg'shwzip, a public-domain reference implementation, could. Seezips/README.md.) - A version banner one full major version earlier than previously
known — and a second one right behind it.
TODAY10.ARC's uncompressedTODAY.EXEreadsTODAY/PC V1.0 (c) 1986 by Patrick Kincaid;TODAY21.ZIP'sTODAY21.EXE(once decoded viahwzip, above) readsTODAY/PC V2.1 (c) 1986, 1988 by Patrick Kincaid— compare theTODAY Version 3.1 09/01/90banner from v3.1 (above). Self-referential entries inTODAY.OWNpin exact dates: the program itself was "born" August 2, 1986, and "born again" (the v2.0 rewrite) March 18, 1988 — both more precise than the "July 1986"/"March 1988" the documentation gives in prose. - The earliest known copy of Kincaid's own version history, predating
the "TODAY's History" section (found in v3.1/v3.3/v3.4, above) by two
years.
TODAY21.DOC: "TODAY/PC was originally written in Datalight C for IBM PC compatible systems by Patrick Kincaid in July of 1986. It was inspired by a program originally written by Mike Butler in PL/1 on an IBM VM/CMS system." Word-for-word the same claim as the later versions, three major releases earlier. - Pins the origin of the
ALTFN/MUSIC/SPACEspecial-database feature (TODO.md item 13) to v2.0, March 1988 — two years earlier than the v3.1/v3.4 documentation that was previously the earliest source for it. - No mention of the moon or lunar phase in either release — the
earliest so far checked, both in documentation and, for both releases'
executables (v1.0's directly readable, v2.1's once decoded via
hwzip), in their own embedded strings. Whatever the 2001 Usenet poster's "lunar phase" recollection referred to, it's not present in the earliest recovered release either. See TODO.md.
A fifth independent implementer, on a third platform. Alongside
Kincaid himself, Hugo Fiennes's ARCbbs module, and Michael Conley's
TODAYDOR/TODAYBBS (below), a CP/M port written in Turbo Pascal by
Mick Howland (amateur radio callsign VK6ZMH, based in Perth, Western
Australia, "c/o Perth Omen" BBS) turned up via the same
discmaster.textfiles.com search, preserved as
zips/TODAY-CPM.ARC. Its own doc: "This is the
CP/M version of the TODAY program that is floating around on the I.B.M.
PC's... As far as i can see, it emulates the I.B.M version correctly." A
self-referential TODAY.OWN entry pins its release to May 22, 1989, and
a source comment ("Enable external I/O port on my TRS-80 Model 4P") shows
Howland ran CP/M on a Tandy TRS-80 Model 4P.
Update (July 2026): identified, but deceased. His full name is Jean-Michel "Mick" Howland, of Perth, Western Australia, and he is listed as a "Silent Key" (deceased amateur radio operator) in the 2008 entry of the Wireless Institute of Australia's Silent Key database — see TODO.md item 17.
Update (July 2026): his CP/M port has actually been run, using
davidly/ntvcm, a cross-platform
8080/Z80/CP/M emulator — after fixing a real gap it exposed in the
emulator (an unimplemented Z80 IN r,(C) instruction Howland's Turbo
Pascal runtime executes at startup; fix submitted upstream as
davidly/ntvcm#32).
TODAY.COM 0628 runs cleanly and reproduces exactly the same short-form
birthday joke and June 28 entries already known from the DOS v1.0/v2.1
releases, confirming this port reused Kincaid's original databases
unmodified. See
screenshots/today-cpm-ntvcm-1947-birthday.txt
and TODO.md item 17.
A companion archive on pcorner.com, TODAYQ1.ZIP–TODAYQ4.ZIP ("Events
for TODAY program," by quarter), shows the dataset was also distributed
separately in a far more expanded form still — TODAY.JAN alone grows
to 57,349 bytes there, larger again than the 23,969-byte TODAY.JAN in
the base TODAY36.ZIP package — more direct evidence, alongside
Fiennes's and Kincaid's own self-referential entries (Sections III and
V), that this dataset kept growing as a crowdsourced, separately-
distributed add-on well after the 1993 release. A standalone
TODAYWIT.ZIP distributes the TODAY.WIT witticisms file on its own,
paired with a XTRAQUOT.TXT of additional quotes in the same F
format.
Update (July 2026): TODAYQ1.ZIP and TODAYWIT.ZIP have now been
retrieved (via discmaster.textfiles.com, since pcorner.com's own
downloads were never captured by the Wayback Machine — only its
/INFO/ listing pages were) and preserved at
zips/TODAYQ1.ZIP and
zips/TODAYWIT.ZIP — see
zips/README.md for full details. Confirmed: the
"far more expanded" hypothesis above holds (1,040/707/1,139 lines for
Jan/Feb/Mar, 5–7x this repo's own month files), and there's real, if
small, verbatim overlap with this repo's data (shared lineage, not
merely a shared file format) — but neither Kincaid's nor Fiennes's
self-referential entries appear anywhere in it. TODAYQ2.ZIP–Q4.ZIP
remain unrecovered (zero hits on discmaster.textfiles.com).
A filename search across discmaster.textfiles.com's roughly 1.6
billion indexed files confirms just how widely this software
circulated. Beyond TODAY33.ZIP and TODAY35.ZIP (recovered in full,
above), the same search turned up 9 further copies of TODAY36.ZIP
(on, among others, Walnut Creek CD-ROM, Chestnut CD-ROM's "Shareware
Overload Trio," and Night Owl PDSI), 1 further copy of TODAY31.ZIP,
and — strikingly — 29 copies of TODAYDOR.ZIP and 26 of
TODAYBBS.ZIP, Michael Conley's Wildcat! door/bulletin programs
(Section V). None of these additional copies were downloaded (their
consistent presence across so many independent CD-ROM collections is
corroboration enough), but two of the TODAY33.ZIP copies found this
way had been re-zipped by warez-scene BBSes, with "leeched from The HMS
Bounty BBS" and "The WaREZ HouZE Super System" banners tacked onto the
archive — harmless provenance noise from later redistribution, not a
content difference from the clean copy preserved here.
One more false positive, also via discmaster.textfiles.com:
TODAY32.ZIP turned out to be an unrelated HP48 calculator application
(under 6 KB, filed under "HP48/Applications" on several "Palmtops"
CD-ROMs). Whether Kincaid ever released a numbered v3.2 at all is
unknown — no archive under that name has surfaced, unlike every other
version from 3.1 through 3.6.
Two more genuine derivatives turned up alongside TODAY34.ZIP, from a
third implementer: Michael Conley. The same bbs.retropc.se file area
that yielded TODAY34.ZIP (preserved at zips/ — see
zips/README.md for full provenance) also has
TODAYDOR.ZIP (TODAYDOR v3.24, a Wildcat! BBS "door" program letting
callers interactively browse any day's TODAY.xxx data, released
04/20/1993) and TODAYBBS.ZIP (TODAYBBS release 3.08, 04/24/1993,
which reads the same files to generate a daily login bulletin). Both are
credited to Michael Conley of The Charlatan's Cabin BBS, Los Angeles,
CA — a third person, independent of both Kincaid and Hugo Fiennes, who
built his own reader for the same data format. TODAYBBS.DOC also names
a fourth party: Bruce Goldman, said to be "producing excellent
TODAY.nnn data files... compatible with TODAYBBS, as well as some other
programs such as NEWDAY/PC," distributed as a numbered series
(DAY907-1.ZIP through DAY907-6.ZIP). Neither Goldman's files nor
NEWDAY/PC have been tracked down yet — see TODO.md.
A same-listing file called WCTODAY.ZIP ("Who Called Today?" v3.5, by
Boardwalk Software, copyright 1989/91) turned out to be an unrelated
Wildcat! BBS caller-log/hello-screen generator — a false positive, noted
in zips/README.md rather than preserved here.
Three more false positives, encountered while searching for the
above. All share the name "TODAY" purely by coincidence: TODAY10.ZIP
on pcorner.com (category "C Source Code") is a Unix/VMS date-and-time-
in-English utility explicitly credited in its own source to Martin
Minow, unrelated to Kincaid despite bundling its own moon-phase code
(MOONTX.C); ADATODAY.ZIP on pcorner.com is an issue of an "Ada
Today" newsletter about the Ada programming language; and TODAY32.ZIP,
found via discmaster.textfiles.com, is an unrelated HP48 calculator
application. None shares any code, data, or attribution with Kincaid's
TODAY.
Rebecca Ann Heineman produced a C++ port of the program, distributed
in her open-source KitchenSink toolkit, and explicitly credited Kincaid
in the source header:
Today, a simple tool to print out today's events Based on source from Patrick Kincaid Copyright 1986-2015 by Rebecca Ann Heineman becky@burgerbecky.com
— tools/all/today/source/today.cpp, Olde-Skuul/KitchenSink
An obituary exists for a Patrick James Kincaid (Newberry, Michigan, June 28, 1947 – Pasadena, California, April 4, 2020), whose career is described as "a data and communications technology consultant" based "in the San Francisco area":
Patrick James Kincaid left us April 4th, 2020 after a short battle with brain cancer... Patrick was born in Newberry, Michigan on June 28th, 1947, raised in Cincinnati in a loving family and pursued a successful career in the San Francisco area as a data and communications technology consultant to some of the world's largest corporations. He retired five years ago to Pasadena to pursue his love of astronomy as a docent at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
— Patrick Kincaid Obituary, San Francisco Chronicle / Legacy.com
Rebecca Ann Heineman died on November 17, 2025, at age 62, after a short illness with aggressive cancer. See Section IV.
No document found in this research directly states that the Patrick
Kincaid who wrote TODAY.DOC in Mill Valley in 1986 is the same Patrick
James Kincaid who died in 2020. Nobody has said, in so many words, "I am
that Patrick Kincaid." What we have instead is three independently
sourced facts that all agree with each other:
- Birthdate:
today.6(this directory's own copy) contains the lineB06281947 Patrick Kincaid, send him a card.— an exactMMDDYYYYmatch, June 28, 1947, for the dataset's presumed compiler. The obituary independently states: "Patrick was born in Newberry, Michigan on June 28th, 1947." Month, day, and year all agree. The same easter-egg entry also turns up independently in the GNUgcaldata lineage (Section III), so it isn't an artifact unique to this one copy. - Geography:
TODAY.DOC's return address is Mill Valley, CA — Marin County, immediately north of San Francisco. The obituary describes a career "in the San Francisco area." The dataset itself is saturated with Bay Area trivia (Golden Gate Bridge, BART, the San Francisco Chronicle, Cliff House, the Presidio, Stern Grove, etc.), whichTODAY.DOCitself calls out as a "distinct San Francisco flavor." - Occupation: A hobbyist who wrote a data-processing utility in C for a PC user group in 1986 is a plausible younger version of someone who later built "a successful career... as a data and communications technology consultant."
None of these three would mean much alone — Kincaid is not a rare surname. But a coincidental match on an exact birthdate, for two men of the same uncommon full name, both independently tied to the same corner of the San Francisco Bay Area, is a low-probability coincidence. This is the standard of evidence a genealogist would generally treat as a settled identification absent a specific reason to doubt it (e.g., a known second Patrick Kincaid in the same social circle, which nothing here suggests).
So: treat "Patrick Kincaid, author of TODAY" and "Patrick James Kincaid
(1947–2020)" as the same person with high confidence. This document still
labels it an inference rather than a "Verified Fact" in Section I only
because no single source states the identification directly — the
distinction is about sourcing methodology, not real doubt about the
conclusion.
Repos discovered via GitHub code search (some found using a distinctive
phrase from this directory's data files, others cross-referenced from
there). Byte/line comparisons below were run against this directory's
today.1–today.12 files.
| Location | Contents | Relationship to this copy |
|---|---|---|
| hfiennes/arcbbs | Today_01–Today_12, TODAY_DOC (Acorn/RISC OS BBS archive) |
Byte-identical for 9 of 12 months, once two cosmetic, non-content artifacts are normalized: this copy's files use DOS-style CRLF line endings and end in a trailing Ctrl-Z (0x1A) DOS EOF marker, neither of which the GitHub copy has (it's LF-only, no EOF marker) — a transfer/re-hosting artifact, not a content difference. The other 3 months have genuine, small, and informative edits: March adds one line, B03311971 Hugo Fiennes, writer of the ARCbbs Archimedes BBS s/w. — the repo owner inserting his own birthday, the same in-joke pattern as Kincaid's own entry. May adds S05141990 ARCbbs gets a 'On this day' feature — which independently dates when this dataset was integrated into Hugo Fiennes's ARCbbs BBS software: May 14, 1990. December has one single-word variant ("good will" vs "goodwill" in the Christmas entry). This is also the only public copy found of the original TODAY.DOC documentation/history file. |
| Olde-Skuul/KitchenSink | tools/all/today/source/today.cpp (C++ port); sdks/{macosx,windows/bin/x86,windows/bin/x64}/today.txt (combined 12-month data) |
Source: rewritten in C++ against Heineman's Burgerlib, not byte-identical, but same record schema and explicitly credits Kincaid. Data: 99.8% line-identical (2,228 of 2,232 birthday/event/reminder records match verbatim across all 12 months). |
| quetwo/cfug-today | frontend/webroot/datefiles/TODAY.JAN–TODAY.DEC (ColdFusion demo rewrite) |
~98% line match for January (189/193). Notably shares one specific transcription glitch with this copy (S0106 SArizona becomes..., a dropped space) that is not present in the KitchenSink or arcbbs copies — suggesting this copy and cfug-today's data descend from a slightly different generation of the file than the KitchenSink/arcbbs one. |
| chrpai/AmigaPensive | AmigaTextFiles/comm/bbs/History/History/Data/TODAY.JAN–.DEC (Amiga BBS door game "History") |
Substantially expanded — only ~91% line match for January (175/193), with many additional community-contributed entries not present here and none of this copy's one known typo. A later, heavily edited descendant. |
| gnu-mirror-unofficial/gcal, and mirrors OS2World/APP-CALENDAR-GNU-gcal, gitGNU/gnu_gcal, Bil3ygr/GnuWin32, Silvenga/GnuWin32-Installer, KevinSShaffer/JJFlexRadio, PedroYRSousa/infra-fundamentos-programacao-win | data/dates/events1, data/dates/lives3 (GNU gcal's bundled trivia data, vendored into many downstream packages) |
Not line-identical — reformatted entirely into "CalenTool" record syntax, zero exact line matches. But the file header explicitly states the data was "extracted from ProLine's today file," and independently contains the same June 28, 1947 Patrick Kincaid self-reference (as ** 06 28 99 99 00 Patrick Kincaid, send him a card. (1947) in lives3). Important corroborating source, not a direct copy. See TODO.md re: "ProLine." |
| IanDarwin/OpenLookCDROM | src/xview/xcalentool/dates/events1, dates/lives3 (the xcalentool/calentool X11 calendar tool) |
Same CalenTool-format lineage as the gcal entries above; likely the direct ancestor those files were copied from. Not independently diffed against this copy beyond the format check. |
| Possibly93/possibly93.github.io | c/files/images/ansi/unsorted/today.jan.ans, today.jun.ans (filed under "ansi" in a BBS file dump, but not actually ANSI art) |
Despite the .ans extension and folder, this is plain-text TODAY.JAN data, misfiled. Nearly identical to this copy, but with two edits indicating a later-generation snapshot: Mozart's birthday is corrected from this copy's B01231756 (January 23 — an error; Mozart was born January 27) to the historically correct B01271756, and a new event line is present, S01281986 Space Shuttle Challenger explodes, killing a brave crew and NASA... — the Challenger disaster (January 28, 1986) postdates Kincaid's July 1986 TODAY/PC release, so this snapshot was updated at least once after the original release. |
| wyattshanahan/BIS | WebDev1/lab08/trivia.dat (student web-dev coursework) |
Not a copy of the B/S/R file format at all — reformatted into CSV (month,day,year,description, e.g. 1,1,1801,Giuseppe Piazzi discovered 1st asteroid...). Confirmed to reuse this dataset's content directly (its January 1 entries match this copy's verbatim, just re-punctuated), pulled in for an unrelated class assignment. A downstream reformatted derivative, similar in kind to cfug-today. |
TODAY10.ARC, discmaster.textfiles.com — preserved at zips/TODAY10.ARC |
TODAY.EXE (uncompressed), all 12 month files, TODAY.DOC, TODAY.OWN (real DOS shareware archive, downloaded and read in full) |
The actual v1.0 (1986/87) release, the earliest recovered — distributed as .ARC, since PKZIP didn't exist yet. This repo's own today.1–.12 are byte-for-byte identical to this release's month files, confirming this repo's copy is a direct transcription of Kincaid's original 1986 databases, not a later snapshot — see Section I. |
TODAY21.ZIP, discmaster.textfiles.com — preserved at zips/TODAY21.ZIP |
TODAY21.EXE, all 12 month files, TODAY21.DOC, TODAY.OWN, TODAYBUG.BAT (real DOS shareware archive, downloaded and read in full — including the 4 of 16 members using PKZIP's old "Reducing" method, decoded via Hans Wennborg's hwzip, since no other tool tried could) |
The actual v2.1 (April 1988) release — a re-zip of the original TODAY21.ARC. 99.6% line match against this repo's month files (2,274/2,284, full 12-month comparison). Its TODAY21.EXE reads TODAY/PC V2.1 (c) 1986, 1988 by Patrick Kincaid. Its doc contains the earliest known copy of Kincaid's "History" text and the ALTFN/MUSIC/SPACE feature's actual introduction (v2.0, March 1988) — see Section I. |
TODAY31.ZIP, archive.org — preserved at zips/TODAY31.ZIP |
TODAY.EXE (uncompressed), all 12 month files, TODAY.DOC, TODAY.OWN, TODAY.WIT, TODAYCFG.EXE (real DOS shareware archive, downloaded and read in full) |
The actual v3.1 (09/01/90) release, MD5-verified against archive.org's own metadata. Byte-exact match for the Usenet-quoted version banner. Line-level comparison against this repo's today.1–.12 shows 68.8% of this repo's lines reappearing verbatim — see Section I for the fuller picture once v1.0/v2.1 are factored in. |
TODAY33.ZIP, discmaster.textfiles.com — preserved at zips/TODAY33.ZIP |
TODAY.EXE, all 12 month files, TODAY.DOC, TODAY.WIT, TODAYCFG.EXE, WHEN.EXE/.DOC (no TODAY.OWN — see Section I) |
The actual v3.3 (May 1991) release. Its TODAY.DOC is byte-for-byte identical to TODAY34.ZIP's, confirming v3.4 was a pure bugfix release. |
TODAY34.ZIP, bbs.retropc.se — preserved at zips/TODAY34.ZIP |
TODAY.EXE, all 12 month files, TODAY.DOC (full manual), TODAY.OWN, TODAY.WIT, TODAYCFG.EXE, WHEN.EXE/.DOC (real DOS shareware archive, downloaded and read in full) |
The actual v3.4 (1991–92) release; downloaded, extracted, and read directly — see Section I for what it revealed. |
TODAY35.ZIP, discmaster.textfiles.com — preserved at zips/TODAY35.ZIP |
TODAY.EXE, all 12 month files, TODAY35.DOC, WHATS.NEW, TODAY.OWN, TODAY.WIT, TODAYCFG.EXE, WHEN.EXE (no separate WHEN.DOC) |
A previously undocumented version (1992), not referenced by any prior source in this research. Its WHATS.NEW explains the shorter TODAY36.DOC style — see Section I. |
TODAY36.ZIP, archive.org — preserved at zips/TODAY36.ZIP |
TODAY.EXE (LZEXE-compressed), TODAY.JAN–.DEC, TODAY36.DOC, WHATS.NEW, README.1ST, TODAY.OWN, TODAYCFG.EXE, WHEN.EXE, TODAY.WIT (real DOS shareware archive, downloaded and read in full; MD5-verified against archive.org's metadata; 9 further copies found via discmaster.textfiles.com but not individually downloaded) |
The actual v3.6 (11/14/93) release, the last documented DOS version — see Section I for what TODAY36.DOC revealed (Corte Madera/PCBoard/"TODAY Conference" detail and Kincaid's "learn a new compiler" remark). |
TODAYDOR.ZIP / TODAYBBS.ZIP, bbs.retropc.se — preserved at zips/ |
Wildcat! BBS "door" (TODAYDOR v3.24) and bulletin-generator (TODAYBBS v3.08) programs, both by Michael Conley (1993) |
Independent third-party readers of the same TODAY.xxx data format — not copies of Kincaid's code, but further evidence (alongside Fiennes's ARCbbs module) that the data format was widely reimplemented rather than treated as tied to one program. See Section I and zips/README.md. |
TODAY-CPM.ARC, discmaster.textfiles.com — preserved at zips/TODAY-CPM.ARC |
A CP/M port in Turbo Pascal (TODAY.COM, TODAY.PAS source, all 12 month files, TODAY.OWN, README.DOC), by Mick Howland (VK6ZMH), Perth, Western Australia, 1989 |
A fifth independent implementer, on a third platform (after DOS and Fiennes's Acorn/RISC OS). Reuses Kincaid's actual databases; self-references pin its release to May 22, 1989. See Section I. |
| ProLine 3.0 source, morgandavis.net | man/man/man.G/today.G, a man page for ProLine's built-in today command (no source/data bundled — see below) |
Not a code or data copy — a documentation trail. The man page directly names Jeff Jungblut (jeff@pro-avalon.cts.com) as author of the ProLine port, and states outright that its database "is from a similar public domain program for the IBM PC called TODAY/PC" — independently confirming Kincaid's exact program name and identifying a sixth independent implementer. This is also the direct source of the "ProLine's today file" attribution in the GNU gcal row above. See TODO.md item 4. |
TODAYQ1.ZIP, discmaster.textfiles.com — preserved at zips/TODAYQ1.ZIP |
Expanded TODAY.JAN/.FEB/.MAR (5–7x this repo's own month files), plus an unrelated bundled GOOD.COM BBS splash screen |
A separately-distributed, far more expanded edition of the data, previously known only from a pcorner.com listing. Real but small verbatim overlap confirms shared lineage with this repo's data, though neither Kincaid's nor Fiennes's self-referential entries appear in it. See Section I and zips/README.md. |
TODAYWIT.ZIP, discmaster.textfiles.com — preserved at zips/TODAYWIT.ZIP |
An expanded standalone TODAY.WIT witticisms file, plus XTRAQUOT.TXT |
Same expanded/separately-maintained pattern as TODAYQ1.ZIP. See Section I and zips/README.md. |
Excluded as false positives: several other hits turned out to be
unrelated programs that merely share a filename with this one.
Two GitHub hits for today.c —
vonj/snippets.org/today.c
(Bob Stout's public-domain scalar-date routine) and
rhuitl/uClinux/user/arj/today.c
(an unrelated build-timestamp generator) — three more found on
pcorner.com while searching for the DOS releases above:
TODAY10.ZIP
(a Unix/VMS date-and-time-in-English utility credited to Martin Minow,
which coincidentally has its own moon-phase code) and
ADATODAY.ZIP
(an issue of an "Ada Today" newsletter about the Ada programming
language) — and one more found alongside TODAY34.ZIP on
bbs.retropc.se: WCTODAY.ZIP ("Who Called Today?" v3.5, by Boardwalk
Software, 1989/91), an unrelated Wildcat! BBS caller-log/hello-screen
generator. None of the five shares any code, data, or attribution with
this program.
A further, deliberate search for TODAY.ZIP, TODAY10.ZIP,
TODAY11.ZIP, TODAY20.ZIP, and TODAY21.ZIP, plus every .ARC/.ARK
variant of the same names (since PKZIP didn't exist before 1989, any
release predating that could only have circulated as .ARC — see above)
turned up two genuine finds (TODAY10.ARC, TODAY21.ZIP, both in the
table above) and several more false positives, all documented in full in
zips/README.md: TODAY11.ZIP (an unrelated BBS
caller-log utility, "Today's Callers v1.1 for PC-Express," 1994); two
more unrelated hits for TODAY10.ZIP (a Windows WinSock utility, and an
entry in a "hackers toolkit" crack-file collection); no hits at all for
TODAY20.ZIP, TODAY20.ARC, TODAY2.ARC, TODAY21.ARC, or
TODAY.ARK; and, for the very common bare name TODAY.ZIP (40+
discmaster.textfiles.com hits), a checked sample that turned out to be
entirely unrelated programs coincidentally sharing the name.
Rebecca Ann Heineman (October 30, 1963 – November 17, 2025) was a pioneering video game programmer and designer — the first officially recognized U.S. video game champion (a national Space Invaders tournament in 1980), a co-founder of Interplay Productions in 1983, and later the founder of Logicware, Contraband Entertainment, and Olde Sküül. She was credited on dozens of titles over her career, including Macintosh/console ports of Wolfenstein 3D, Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and DOOM (3DO). She was also a prominent transgender advocate in an industry that had few.
Her KitchenSink/Burgerlib toolset — a personal grab-bag of
cross-platform utilities she maintained for decades — includes the C++
port of today discussed above, credited to Kincaid in its header
comment and copyrighted 1986–2015.
Heineman died on November 17, 2025, at age 62, following an aggressive adenocarcinoma diagnosed earlier that year. Coverage was extensive and consistent across independent outlets:
A note on her web presence, as of this research (July 2026): her
personal domain, burgerbecky.com, no longer serves her site — it now
redirects to an unrelated Indonesian gambling ("togel") site. A WHOIS
lookup shows the domain registration itself is unbroken and unchanged
since 2005 (still registered through GoDaddy, still active, paid through
January 2027), but its DNS was repointed to a new Cloudflare nameserver
pair in late February/early March 2026 — after the last known-good
Wayback Machine capture of the site on January 16, 2026
(archived copy).
This pattern — continuous registration, but a DNS change with no
corresponding transfer — is more consistent with an unmaintained account
being compromised than with the domain simply lapsing. Her other domain,
oldeskuul.com, currently times out entirely. Both are consistent with,
and likely explained by, there being no one left to maintain her
infrastructure after her death. This is noted here for the record, not
as part of the Kincaid research thread.
Update: the whole site has since been mirrored from the Wayback
Machine and preserved at
bicknell/burgerbecky.com —
4,077 files (the last good pre-hijack capture of every page, as of a
January 20, 2026 cutoff), including the burgerlib documentation, her
personal pages, and some fanfiction she'd hosted there. See that repo's
README for the full recovery methodology.
Unlike Kincaid and Heineman, the person behind the earliest independently dated derivative copy of this dataset (Section III) is alive, publicly documented, and reachable — which makes him the most promising lead for first-hand confirmation of anything in this document.
Identity. The GitHub account hfiennes, source of the arcbbs
archive discussed throughout this document, belongs to Hugo Fiennes — his
real name, returned directly by the GitHub API's profile data for that
account. His own arcbbs README, written in the first person, describes
the repository as his personal archive of !ARCbbs, "my BBS software for
the Acorn Archimedes (last seen ~1994)," recovered from old disk images
decades later, and ends with an open offer: "If you want any help, ask!"
Early computing background matches the dataset's own internal
timeline. Multiple independent sources — his Computer History Museum
profile and an
Engineering.com
profile
among them — state he has "been an ARM fanatic since 1987, when he got
his first ARM-based machine: an Acorn Archimedes A310." That lines up
exactly with the internal evidence in his own arcbbs data (Section
III): the Archimedes in 1987, and the self-dated addition of an "On this
day" feature to ARCbbs on May 14, 1990. He ran a BBS on this software
called "The World of Cryton."
Education and early career, per his LinkedIn profile
(linkedin.com/in/hfiennes,
viewed directly July 2026 — photo confirmed to match his other public
profiles): a degree in Computer Systems Engineering from the University
of Warwick, 1994–1997. Notably, well before that degree, the same profile
lists a certification in VAX/VMS system management from DEC (Digital
Equipment Corporation), Reading, UK, dated 1986 — meaning he had
hands-on training on exactly the class of minicomputer that carried
Usenet/EUnet traffic in the UK at the time, years before his university
education and around the same period this dataset was first circulating
outside Kincaid's own hands. This doesn't establish that Fiennes
encountered TODAY via Usenet specifically rather than via BBS/UUCP
networks, but it does establish that he was, at a young age, exactly the
kind of technically embedded person who plausibly had Usenet access in
the mid-to-late 1980s — worth keeping in mind for
TODO.md's open question of how the data actually reached him
by 1990.
Family and later career. A distant cousin of actors Ralph Fiennes and Joseph Fiennes. After the BBS years, he founded Empeg Ltd. in 1998, building the empeg — widely credited as the first in-car MP3 player — then worked on further MP3 players at Rio, then joined Apple, where he led the applications-processor hardware team through the first four generations of the iPhone, then designed hardware for the Nest Learning Thermostat, then co-founded the IoT platform company Electric Imp in 2011 as CEO. He's currently based in San Carlos, California.
Why this matters for the research trail. Fiennes's data isn't just
another copy — his edits to it (Section III) are self-referential in the
same style as Kincaid's own June 28 entry, which is independent
behavioral evidence for how this dataset was actually used and passed
around: recipients treated it as a living, editable artifact and added
themselves to it, rather than as a static file to be copied verbatim.
That he's alive and has publicly invited contact makes him the best
remaining chance to fill in the gap between Kincaid's 1986 release and
the dataset's appearance in the GNU gcal/ProLine lineage by 1990–91.
Direct correspondence, July 2026. Bicknell contacted Fiennes directly; he replied:
Ha! Yeah, the whole "on this day" thing was very popular with BBSes back in the day. It's not really the program there though, I wrote my own code that would read the lines and pick out the right one - my C code for that is here https://github.com/hfiennes/arcbbs/blob/main/c/today
I'm guessing I got a copy of the files from another BBS sysop, or downloaded it from another BBS. I'm afraid I have no contact with any of the people noted in the DOC file. A good person to ask might be this guy who compiled a lot of stuff about old BBSes: http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/
Sure, invite me to the repo but I'm very much a leaf node in this whole thing! Like, as a BBS user I guess I saw the message of the day type thing on another BBS and added the feature to my software. Glad I remembered to credit it appropriately, it was a long time ago!
This resolves several open questions from TODO.md item 9, while opening one new one:
- He wrote his own reader, not a port of Kincaid's code. The C source
at
c/today, hfiennes/arcbbs is an independent implementation — it parses the sameB/S/R-record data format described inTODAY.DOC, but the code itself owes nothing to Kincaid's C. Its own header credits only Fiennes: "Project ARCbbs / Author Hugo Fiennes / Date started 04-April-1989 ... Module name On this day... / Current version 00.04 / Version date 09-November-1991 ... This source is COPYRIGHT (c) 1989/90/91 by Hugo Fiennes of The Serial Port." So the "on this day" feature was independently reimplemented at least twice — Kincaid's original DOS program, and Fiennes's Acorn BBS module — around a shared, portable data format. That's evidence for how loosely this dataset traveled: as a plain-text file people wrote their own small readers for, not as a single monolithic program people copied wholesale. - The propagation mechanism is confirmed as BBS-to-BBS, not (necessarily) Usenet. Fiennes says plainly he encountered the feature as a BBS user on someone else's board and then wrote his own version of it, and that he most likely obtained the data files "from another BBS sysop, or downloaded it from another BBS" — direct first-hand testimony for the general BBS-scene propagation model discussed in TODO.md item 3, as against a Usenet-posting-first theory.
- He has no lead on Kincaid or Butler, and explicitly disclaims deeper knowledge: "I'm very much a leaf node in this whole thing."
- New lead: Jason Scott / bbsdocumentary.com. Fiennes's own suggestion for who might know more about this era's software lineage. Not yet contacted — see TODO.md.
TODAY_DOC, hfiennes/arcbbs — primary source, Kincaid's own documentation; the same repo'sToday_03andToday_05files date this dataset's integration into Hugo Fiennes's ARCbbs software to May 14, 1990today.cpp, Olde-Skuul/KitchenSinktoday.txtdata files, Olde-Skuul/KitchenSinkTODAY.JAN–.DEC, quetwo/cfug-todayTODAY.JAN–.DEC, chrpai/AmigaPensivedata/dates/lives3, gnu-mirror-unofficial/gcal — contains the independent Kincaid birthday corroboration and the "ProLine's today file" attributiondata/dates/events1, gnu-mirror-unofficial/gcalsrc/xview/xcalentool/dates, IanDarwin/OpenLookCDROM- Patrick Kincaid Obituary (1947–2020), Legacy.com/SF Chronicle
- UTMBiology Facebook post, June 5, 2019 — names Michael Butler and the 1981 mainframe debut; archived as
screenshots/utmbiology-facebook-2019-06-05.png - [Rebecca Heineman obituary coverage — see Section IV for full list]
- Rebecca Heineman, Wikipedia
- Hugo Fiennes, Computer History Museum profile
- Meet the Man Who Designed Your iPhone, Engineering.com
- Hugo Fiennes, LinkedIn — education and DEC VAX/VMS certification details
- comp.os.msdos Usenet post, Andy Ziem, Sept 15, 2001 — "Old TODAY/PC program by Patrick Kincaid, 1986?"; establishes the v3.1 (1990) and v3.3 (1993) version banners and the loss of the lunar-phase feature
- rec.org.sca Usenet post, Jerod Husvar, Aug 10, 1995 — "[GENERAL INFO] Medieval News Of The Day," a modified copy of v3.1 (1990) repurposed for SCA/medieval trivia
- fido7.moscow-oklahom Fidonet post, Gary Baumgartner, Jan 2004 — shows v3.6 (11/14/93), the latest documented DOS revision found
c/today, hfiennes/arcbbs — Hugo Fiennes's own independent C implementation reading the same data format- Hugo Fiennes, personal correspondence with Leo Bicknell, July 2026 — see Section V
TODAY36.ZIPfile listing, pcorner.com (via Wayback Machine snapshot, June 23, 2024) — first evidence of the package's contents, before the actual archive (source 30, below) was found on archive.org- 1997 file-description ("DIZ") for
TODAY36.ZIP, pcorner.com — earliest dated attestation of this package in circulation, names Kincaid directly TODAYQ1.ZIP–Q4, andTODAYWIT.ZIP, pcorner.com — separately-distributed, more expanded data/witticisms packsTODAY10.ZIP, pcorner.com — false positive, Martin Minow's unrelated date/time utilityADATODAY.ZIP, pcorner.com — false positive, an Ada-language newsletterTODAY34.ZIP, bbs.retropc.se — the actual v3.4 release, downloaded and read in full; preserved atzips/TODAY34.ZIP, seezips/README.mdTODAYDOR.ZIPandTODAYBBS.ZIP, bbs.retropc.se — Michael Conley's independent BBS-door/bulletin readers of the same data format; preserved atzips/- bbs.retropc.se
smmwldctfile listing — index page these were found in WCTODAY.ZIP, bbs.retropc.se — false positive, Boardwalk Software's unrelated "Who Called Today?" caller-log utilityTODAY31.ZIPandTODAY36.ZIP, Internet Archive — the actual v3.1 and v3.6 releases, downloaded, MD5-verified, and read in full; preserved atzips/, seezips/README.mdTODAY34.ZIP,TODAYDOR.ZIP, andTODAYBBS.ZIP, obtained independently by Leo Bicknell fromannex.retroarchive.org(cdrom/smsw-modmad-1/WILDCAT/), July 2026 — byte-for-byte identical (SHA-256 confirmed) to the bbs.retropc.se copies above, corroborating their exact circulation on a second CD-ROM collection; seezips/README.mdTODAY33.ZIPandTODAY35.ZIP, via discmaster.textfiles.com — previously undocumented versions, downloaded and read in full; preserved atzips/, seezips/README.md- Michael Conley, "TODAYBBS files,"
alt.bbs.wildcat, June 8, 1996 — confirms Bruce Goldman's continued data maintenance (series "910") and Mustang Software's role in distribution TODAY10.ARC, discmaster.textfiles.com — the actual v1.0 (1986/87) release, the earliest recovered; downloaded and read in full; preserved atzips/TODAY10.ARC, seezips/README.md. This repo's owntoday.1–.12are byte-for-byte identical to this release's month files.TODAY21.ZIP, discmaster.textfiles.com — the actual v2.1 (April 1988) release; downloaded and read in full; preserved atzips/TODAY21.ZIP, seezips/README.mdTODAY-CPM.ARC, discmaster.textfiles.com — Mick Howland's independent CP/M port (Turbo Pascal, 1989); preserved atzips/TODAY-CPM.ARC, seezips/README.mdTODAY11.ZIP, discmaster.textfiles.com — false positive, "Today's Callers v1.1 for PC-Express," an unrelated BBS caller-log utility- Walter Olson, "Marin: GGCS Internet SIG Meeting,"
ba.internet, June 16, 1994 — confirms the Golden Gate Computer Society was formerly named the Marin/Sonoma PC Users Group, resolving TODO.md item 12 - Golden Gate Computer Society, ggcs.org and its About page — the group's current, still-active website; confirms 1981 founding and provides current contact information (see TODO.md item 18)
- bicknell/burgerbecky.com — a Wayback Machine mirror of Rebecca Heineman's personal site, made as an offshoot of this research after the domain hijack was discovered (Section IV); see TODO.md item 6
- Wireless Institute of Australia Silent Key database — confirms Jean-Michel "Mick" Howland, VK6ZMH, died in 2008; see TODO.md item 17
usbbs152.lst, a dial-up BBS phone-number directory (mirrored at textfiles.serverrack.net and textfiles.meulie.net) — independently corroborates Michael Conley as the sysop of "Charlatan Cabn" in Los Angeles, at a different phone number than his 1996 Usenet post; see TODO.md item 15- Morgan Davis, "ProLine," morgandavis.net, and its
proline-3.0-source.zip, specificallyman/man/man.G/today.G— names Jeff Jungblut as author of ProLine'stodayport and confirms Kincaid's program name "TODAY/PC" directly, resolving most of TODO.md item 4 mywave82/unlzexe— POSIX-ported build of the classicUNLZEXEdecompressor, used to decode the LZEXE-compressedTODAY.EXEbinaries inTODAY34.ZIP/TODAY35.ZIP/TODAY36.ZIPTODAYQ1.ZIP, discmaster.textfiles.com andTODAYWIT.ZIP, discmaster.textfiles.com — expanded, separately-distributed data/witticisms packs, downloaded and compared against this repo's own data; preserved atzips/, seezips/README.mddavidly/ntvcm— a cross-platform 8080/Z80/CP/M 2.2 emulator, used to actually run Mick Howland's CP/M port (TODAY.COM); required a small upstream fix, submitted as davidly/ntvcm#32, for an unimplementedIN r,(C)instruction
Compiled July 2026. See TODO.md for open research threads.