Not a picture of a BBS. The BBS.
CONNECT shows you 198 front doors. These are the ones you can walk through — the real software, the same executables sysops ran, under DOS in this page.
Board: Telegard 3.09.g2 Spitfire 3.1 TriBBS 4.02 SuperBBS 1.17 Ezycom 1.02 Maximus 2.00 RemoteAccess 0.04 GT POWER — the dialler
DOSBox is about a megabyte of WebAssembly and the board is another few hundred kilobytes. Press start and it will fetch them.
▶ start the board · click the screen to give it your keyboard
Nothing you do here lasts, and that is deliberate
The board is re-read from the server every time this page loads. Delete every file, wreck the message base, throw the users out — reload, and the next visitor gets it whole. So use it as a sysop would: everything is unlocked.
It will ask you for personal details. It is a DOS program running inside your own browser and nothing it collects leaves your machine — but there is no reason to give it anything real, and it only wants a plausible answer. Use these:
| Telephone number | 555-555-0100 |
| … on Maximus | (555) 555-0100 |
| … on Spitfire | 5555550100 |
| Birth date | 01-01-80 |
| … on Ezycom | 01-01-1980 |
| City | Riyadh, Saudi Arabia |
| Password | six characters or more |
555-01xx is the block the telephone
companies reserved for fiction, which is why it is
the number on the wall rather than a real one. Each
board validates the shape of what you type and no two
agree: Maximus insists on [(xxx) yyy-zzzz]
and rejects the plain dashes, Spitfire wants ten bare
digits and adds the dashes itself, Ezycom wants a
four-digit year. Getting this wrong is the commonest
way to get stuck, and it is the board being 1992, not
you being wrong.
Telegard BBS 3.09.g2
— Copyright © 1994, 1998 Tim Strike. All rights
reserved.
Tim Strike wrote Telegard through the 1990s and gave it to people
running boards out of spare rooms. He has since died, so permission
cannot be asked for and the copyright cannot be renegotiated. His
name stays on it — here, and on every screen of it —
because attribution is the only respect left to pay.
Installed with Telegard's own INSTALL.EXE, unpacked
with the password READYTOGO that Tim Strike printed in
INSTALL.DOC. Nothing was patched or cracked. Telegard
reports itself possibly obsolete on startup — a 1998 gamma
release saying so is part of the record, and it is left where it
falls.
GT POWER 17.06
— Copyright © 1985, 1991 P&M Software Co. (Paul
Meiners), Phoenix, Arizona. Shareware, and unusually
frank about it: the program states outright that it contains no
use lock, only a third of a second of delay at startup, and asks
for $70 if you find it useful.
The phone directory was not hand-built or reverse-engineered. GT
POWER ships its own utility, GT_UTIL, whose twelfth
option imports a plain text BBS list — and Paul Meiners
documented the exact format it wants: telephone number in the
first column, columns separated by at least two consecutive
periods, names beginning with a digit in quotes. The list is in
the bundle as BBSLIST.TXT so the import can be
repeated.
It holds 147 boards — every board in this
collection whose telephone number appears in the phone book under
a name. Not 198: artwork survives for 198, but 51 of those numbers
are in no directory at all, and a phone book entry needs a name.
Those 51 are on CONNECT under Not in
the phone book, which is where an unanswered number
belongs.
GT stores a board’s name and its years in one
thirty-character field, so seventeen of the 147 lose part of their
date range. Every name survives whole — the longest is
twenty-nine characters. That is Paul Meiners’ field width,
not an editorial cut. Ampersands are left as the boards wrote
them: an earlier build replaced & with
and and turned D&D VIP Data Exchange into
“DandD”, a name no board ever had.
RemoteAccess
0.04 — Copyright © 1990 Continental Software (Andrew
Milner). Unregistered; the board says
“Don’t forget to register!” on the way out.
Like SuperBBS and Ezycom it locates its configuration through a
DOS environment variable, and like SuperBBS it wants a limits
file written by hand — one line per security level, giving
a daily time allowance and a download allowance per modem speed.
The step that cost the most, though, was not the
program’s doing: its config editor asks “Do you
wish to save any changes?” as you leave, and quitting
without answering leaves a file that exists and is empty.
Maximus-CBCS
2.00 — Copyright © 1989-1992 Scott J. Dudley, FidoNet
1:249/106. Supplementary and OS/2 code by Peter
Fitzsimmons, 1:250/628.
Maximus compiles its configuration rather than reading it. MAID
turns the language source into a binary; SILT turns six control
files into MAX.PRM; and MAX.PRM is the
only thing the board itself opens. MAID insists on a full path
with no extension, an empty USER.BBS has to exist
before the first caller, and MAX.PRM records the
language file’s timestamp — copy the tree without
preserving modification times and the board refuses to start.
Every one of those was in the manual.
Ezycom 1.02
— Copyright © 1992 Peter Davies. Unregistered,
as distributed.
Ezycom is the best-mannered program in this collection. Where the
others stop at the first thing they cannot find, Ezycom lists
every missing directory in one pass — and when its file
index was absent it printed the exact command to build one,
EZYFF -C, rather than an error number. It still
wants its files located through a DOS environment variable and
started with -L, the same two habits as SuperBBS.
SuperBBS 1.17
— Copyright © 1990, 1993 Risto Virkkala & Aki
Antman.
Finnish shareware — the distribution still carries
SUOMI.LNG beside the English one. Unregistered, and
it says so to every caller.
Three things stood between this board and a login, none of them
documented anywhere near each other. It finds its own files
through a DOS environment variable rather than its config, so it
reported a missing language file that was sitting in plain sight.
It needs a LANGUAGE.CTL that no installer writes and
the manual only mentions on page 103. And it wants a FOSSIL serial
driver unless started with -L. All three came out of
its own documentation in the end, which is where I should have
looked first.
TriBBS 4.02
— Copyright © 1991-1993 Mark D. Goodwin.
Shareware out of Bangor, Maine; the registration fee was $75 and
this copy was never registered, which the board announces to every
caller. Nothing has been done about that, because a board saying
what it is is part of what a board was.
Unmodified apart from SET1995.COM, the same
twenty-eight bytes used elsewhere here to set the DOS clock back
before the board starts.
SPITFIRE
Bulletin Board System 3.1 — Copyright © 1987-1991 Mike
Woltz, Buffalo Creek Software.
Spitfire was shareware out of Iowa, and it builds itself from
nothing: handed an empty directory it asks permission and creates
every data file it needs. That is why it is the second board here
— it needed no installer that has since been lost.
Unregistered, as distributed. The only thing added to it is
SET1995.COM, twenty-eight bytes that set the DOS clock
back before the board starts, because the program will not run in
2026.
