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Well, the Packet radio network is complex, and it is going to be even more complex. New nodes come up, Internet gateways connect all continents together, and all in all we have a network which is global. However, due to several reasons, it is not obvious how to make a way through this jungle. This is due to several different routing systems are used, or sometimes just the automatic routing is disabled.
This is where Digiinfo comes in. Digiinfo itself has existed in several versions on several operating systems, written by several authors. I guess, DF3VI's Version for MS-DOS is the most popular.
Digiinfo is a small database system which tries to list as much digipeaters, mailboxes & nodes as possible. You just ask it for a certain node, and it tells you where it is located, what operating frequencies it has, what its link neighbors are & so on. And - this is the most important feature - you can ask it for a way betwen node A and node B, and it will find it, if it exists.
It uses the data which is voluntarily collected by the HAMMAP team. HAMMAP is the "big brother" of Digiinfo. While digiinfo is a command line tool, HAMMAP is a graphical application showing you a world map, whith all known nodes and its links on it.
Well, I used digiinfo quite often for doing "DX-Expeditions" on the packet radio network. So when I started to use the LINUX operating system, I was in trouble because I no longer had access to it. So I decided to port it to Linux.
Karsten, DC7OS, provided me with the C source code of his Digiinfo program for the ATARI platform.
I then ported it to Linux. This happened in 1995. I posted it to LINUX@WW that time.
Meanwhile, nothing more happened to digiinfo, except that I confused all the different development versions I had on my HD and gave away some development versions and promptly created a version chaos. Also, I upgraded my license and got a new callsign assigned. Since the Linux community constantly grows, and I recently got a few demands for the latest version of it, I think it is time to fix my version chaos by just naming the version 2.5 and make it publically available.
A minor bug causing data corruption has been fixed, the current version is thus digiinfo-2.5.1!