The package started when I was working with John Gilmore to port a clone of the UUCICO transfer program at that point called UUSLAVE. With a IBM-PC serial port driver I built previously, I moved John's UNIX port over to the PC.
Very soon after I wrote a couple of programs called fidouucp.exe and uucpfido.exe that would move files back and forth between FidoNet style *.msg format and the typical D.*, C.* and X.* UUCP file formats for the UUSLAVE (now GNUUCP) program. About this same time I found a couple of other folks using GNUUCP/UUSLAVE to do the same thing. John Galvin was doing the fidouucp/uucpfido code and Garry Paxinos was spiffing up UUSLAVE to work with the FOSSIL comm drivers.
To make a long story short, we all agreed to pool our efforts and after about a year's worth of beta testing, UFGATE was released to the Fidonet community. (BTW... This is when Late Night Software was born as we were all hacking this after hours.)
This only "covers" half of the project as much work was done to set up the proper addressing for this new fangle network called ARPAnet, or as we know it now, the Internet. This is the HOWTO document that covers how to map FidoNet to Ineternet mail addressing.
You can check out the "latest" UFGATE release from about '89, UFG_103.ZIP