Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2005 20:37:09 From: Oliver "kfsone" Smith To: bbssoftware@bbsdocumentary.com Subject: BBS-PC! Amiga BBS-PC!'s Amiga hey-dey was coincident with the flowering of FidoNet. In the UK boards like "The Plug 'Ole" and "MetNet Triangle" were running BBS-PC!. It was of the old-fashioned BBS style with upto 16 "SIG"s (Special Interest Groups) for discussion. I wrote a small tool in C which allowed you to reserve one SIG to a network. This allowed the formation of a rather large star network. My board had what I believe was one of the first online "pub"s, complete with a user called "Walkin' Dude" who took on the role of "The Barman". At one point we had over 100 nodes in the network, with mail flowing across Europe and even to the US, most of them joined to pull "The Pub" and allow local users to participate in this wide-area social club. Jon Witty's MetNet triangle remained a hub for a long time, but as people started to migrate to Paragon BBS most of the networks splintered. 5-6 years later I was still occasionally hearing from small groups of BBSes that were running the tools. Shortly before I switched from BBS-PC! to Paragon, I also extended the mailnet tool to allow you to share file lists, so that BBS-PC! users could find out which board to go to for a particular download. It failed to catch on because the BBS-PC! networks were splintering. I wrote a similar tool for Paragon BBS a year or so later, but it failed to catch on mainly because some of the new boards would rather have the file available to download from them than tell you who else might carry it. - Oliver