Scott Lee writes "Skyline BBS, for the Amiga, was originally marketed under the name "Atredes
BBS". It was written by someone named Michael Cox who lived in El Paso, TX
in the mid/late 80s. He had contracted with a company, which I can't
remember the name of, to market and sell the software and they did so under
the name Atredes. Michael Cox eventually wound up selling the software
himself and he renamed it Skyline. After about two years he grew tired of
working on it and looked for a buyer. During that search, I did
maintenance and housekeeping on the code for a few months before a user of
the software that ran Omnilink BBS in Queens, NY bought the rights."
"It was, BTW, cool software which allowed for plain text, ANSI graphics, as
well as a proprietary graphical point and click "SkyPix" UI using special
terminal software ("SkyTerm"). This was all around the '87 time frame
which I think pegs it as the first graphical point & click BBS UI..."
Les Jenkins writes "The company Michael had contracted with was called Incognito Software
located in Troy, Michigan. Now defunct, this company had intended to
become THE software publishing house for Amiga software and in addition
to Atredes they licensed various other software for the Amiga such as
Dave Ashley's game Popman (a clone of Lode Runner) which they sold under
the name Targis. The reason Michael eventually reclaimed the rights is
mainly because the two guys who ran Incognito Software where less than
intelligent and somewhat morally questionable. Dave writes a bit about it
on his website at http://www.xdr.com/dash/dave.html. In short, Michael
never saw much if any money from the sales of his software on the Amiga
until he took it under his own wing and the same is pretty much true of
all the other folks who licensed their projects to Incognito.
Why do I know all of this? Because I used to run the Pontiac Area Amiga
User's Group (Pontiac, Michigan) and was one of the "official"
beta-testers for Atredes when it was first released. I ran it and Skyline
for awhile before switching to DLG BBS and eventually Amiga CNet Pro. I'm
the former sysop for Les's Place stretching from 1983 or so until 1991."