It became a platform remarkably quickly.

A live ACARS client in a web browser.

The recovered acarsd-live.tar.gz is an early test system from the first ACARSd year. A small daemon named acarsdhttpd connected to an ACARSd server and exposed data to a PHP application on TCP port 82.

The chain was already recognisable as a web application architecture:

ACARSd → acarsdhttpd → TCP/82 → PHP → JavaScript → browser

The page warned visitors that ACARS LIVE was “ONLY A TESTVERSION AND NOT FULLY TESTED” and offered live traffic from central Hungary at N46.50 E17.54. The browser refreshed the traffic display repeatedly and updated up to four aircraft images as new registrations appeared.

ACARSd already had its own aircraft map.

The recovered Tcl/Tk client source shows a live map system built from local static GIF maps. When an ACARS message contained usable latitude and longitude, the client converted those geographic coordinates directly into pixels on a Tk canvas and plotted the aircraft. Consecutive reports could be joined into a visible track.

The map was not dependent on a web mapping service. The map image had configurable geographic limits, and the client calculated its own pixels-per-degree scale. Airports, waypoints, server locations and the receiver's own position could be drawn on the same canvas.

x = (longitude - map_left) × pixels_per_degree_x
y = (map_top - latitude) × pixels_per_degree_y

ACARS message → position parser → LAT/LON → Tk canvas → aircraft + trail

The limitation was ACARS itself: usable position reports were comparatively rare. Later, SBS-1 changed that. libhomeradar read the BaseStation plain-text feed on TCP port 30003 and fed ADS-B/Mode-S information into the same ecosystem; in ACARSClient those records were deliberately marked *SBS-1* so users could distinguish them from ACARS traffic.

The network was open enough for somebody else to build a client.

The original ACARSd download page listed JACARS as a “Free JAVA client for the acarsd network”. The server HOWTO treated it as a normal alternative to ACARSdClient/clientNG and explained how users could connect it to public or private ACARSd servers.

The surviving ACARSd archive does not identify the programmer by name with enough certainty for this museum to do so. What it does prove is more important: the published network/API was usable by software outside KjM's own Tcl/Tk clients.

dbadd_lhr fed both the database and the live ecosystem.

KjM remembers dbadd_lhr.c as an important real-time source for ATLAS and other displays. The recovered source supports that role: it continuously scans uploaded ACARSd contact files, writes operational records into MySQL and also normalises the same contacts for libhomeradar through homeradar_import_by_string().

It explicitly recognises SBS-derived position/callsign markers, allowing digital contacts to enter the same broader aircraft-data path. The surviving code also performs periodic cleanup on its operational tables; the exact long-term-history path is still being reconstructed and may become much clearer if the original MySQL master can be recovered.