STARBASE7 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Apple Macintosh BBS for old 68k Macs. Likely won't run on modern Macintosh Machines. Extract it with StuffIt Expander to a folder, then run it from that folder. You can also run the Installer application to wipe all the message boards, and start over, etc. A very long time ago (circa 1989-1993) worked on a Macintosh BBS called StarBase7, but was never released. It was built on an Apple Lisa running Mac OS 4 under MacWorks. I wrote it for a guy who was running a BBS on an Apple II with a 5meg profile drive. Though I had a 286 PC at the time and could have written one on the PC, he didn't have one, but he did have a Mac. So I was able to write code on the Lisa that would run on a Mac. Unfortunately, the only programming environment for the Mac I had at the time was Zedcor Corp's ZBasic. It was a hell of an ugly environment, but it was replaced by FutureBASIC which supported functions, procedures, and to a very limited extent data structures... But by this time most of the code was already written, and it was all filled with GOSUBs and GOTOs. So I spent a long time cleaning it up, and even writing tools to automate the conversion from subroutines to functions, and even tried to write a Basic to C converter to get it ported to C. (I guess that would be a perfect example of throwing more good programming effort after bad code?) :) In terms of the BBS itself, it was quite advanced despite these limitations... It didn't support RIP script yet, but it did do ANSI+PC fonts for line graphics very well and even featured a full screen based message editor with full scrolling, word wrap, etc. It even had a form of hypertext scripting, and tags to set color coding, underlining, etc. You could even write a message to everyone, but include paragraphs that would only be visible to either certain users/groups based on an access level/group memberships... It had built in support for fortune cookies, "On this day" files, one line scrolling board messages, even had a built in mini script language which the sysop could use to write doors, games, etc... In contrast, most Macintosh BBS's at that time were primitive text only beasts. This had a very nice UI system. The user could even select the type of UI he/she wanted - there was one that looked somewhat like Searchlight's. Another that would let you see a text menu, another that would just accept two keystrokes - for experts, etc... Back in those days, most people had 2400bps modems, so the less text you displayed, the faster it responded. The idea was to start them off with full GUI menus, then, as they discovered the features of the BBS, they could opt for the faster terse UI. At it's core was a tree/threaded style message structure which very few BBS's had - even in the PC world... By the time I had stopped work on it, the World Wide Web had begun to take off, and BBS's faded... well that, and I got a full time job as a Novell Netware admin, which ate all time, so the project fell by the wayside. I intended to work on it again, but never did. There was simply too much to do, and too little time, and pretty soon, I lost interest in BBS's... I remember that the last things I was working on was trying to getting it to run multiuser, trying to change some of the internal message database structures to use a B-Tree for faster searching and to get rid of some of the message structure limitations...