The Dark Side of the Moon BBS in San Jose, CA, originally ran as an AE (Ascii Express) line in the mid 1980's. Because Ascii Express was already demonstrating bugs and issues at that time, the maintainers rewrote the AE interface from scratch on a new program. After a while, they were constricted by the pure file transfer aspects of the AE Line, and announced they were going to become a BBS. This new software, called Waffle, took the line by storm and turned out to be a flexible, fun, well-coded piece of work. After a period of time, the creator (Tom Dell, Sysop of The Dark Side) chose to port his program over to the PC as well as UNIX and Xenix, and the program gained new life on the PC Platform as it was distributed as both a free and for-pay program.

What won many folks over to Waffle, however, was its ease of interface to the UUCP (Unix to Unix Copy) networks and protocol. With extreme ease, you could integrate newsgroups and e-mail directly into your BBS. In the late 1980's. Waffle could even be run as a pure mail tosser, rejecting the BBS aspect entirely. This caused a specific and large burst of interest.

Waffle formed the basis for the famous MINDVOX BBS service in New York City, and while Dell had little direct involvement, his code was used extensively to hook in many disparate elements under a single interface.

Ultimately, Waffle's distribution ended at 1.65, although a version 1.66 was in beta at the main website. There was work being done on CHROME, a graphical interface to Waffle, and so on. However, the encroaching of the Internet led the author to aim his skills in other directions, dooming Waffle as an ongoing project.