APPLE: II: PBBS
Author: John Pechacek
Additional Notes:
John Pechacek writes ""Apple-Net" was written from scratch in 1982 to run the Safehouse BBS on an Apple II+ with two disk drives and a Novation Apple-Cat 300 bps modem (the software was written to mimmick my favorite BBSes like Loki's Corner and Mario's Hideout both in Minnesota running on the "Net-Works" BBS software). In 1984 I had to change the name to PBBS (Personal BBS) since the old name was obviously a major trademark infringement. This version of the software was bought by a few hundred Sysops around the U.S. and Canada. It was single-CPU only running on Apple DOS 3.x. By 1985 Safehouse ran on Apple's new ProDOS and was multi-CPU (4 phone lines at 2400 bps, 4 Apple //e's) networked through a massive(!) Corvus 45 meg hard drive using shared memory and semaphores on the hard drive to allow user's to see who's online and initiate multi-user chat to other users. This version of the software was called PBBS Pro and several customers had paid in advance for a copy. However after weeks of troubleshooting and support calls to Apple developer support I was unable to secure a fix for a fatal bug in Apple ProDOS that caused it to spontaneously crash at seemingly random times (I think it was a memory leak or buffer overflow). I knew I could not ship the software with that flaw so I canned the product, sent the checks back, and never developed Apple software again. I think Safehouse went off the air shortly thereafter."