Comment by cubano

12 years ago

I'm noticing a good deal of BBS references lately in HN stories, and I can't help being amused by this...because, as it happens, the company I started in 1989 when I was fresh out of school wrote realtime interactive BBS software.

If you are so inclined, check out page 6 of this "ancient" scan of a newsletter (yes, advertising for online software used to be done by newsletter :) produced around 1993...my company, MagiComm, wrote an online search engine, very nice ANSII realtime interactive games like Sub Striker and Backgammon (with ELO ratings no less), and other pretty cool stuff.

http://pdf.textfiles.com/zines/MAJORNEWS/majornewsv4i1.pdf

Code was straight C, with BTREE tables (no SQL) on 386/486s and, in the beginning, a 640k memory limit.

You may not approve of my development choices but you sure can't say I was behind the times.

Anyway, it's super gratifying to read about kids being inspired by BBS software, knowing I created a tiny part of it.

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cubano

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alfiedotwtf  12 years ago

Nice! Although BBS doors in C could have been risky cough.

> it's super gratifying to read about kids being inspired by BBS software

Inspired? Man... I remember one time I was online and the SysOp initiated chat mode. After a while he told me he wrote some of the doors for his BBS. At first I didn't believe him because he was one person and not a giant company with fancy computers, but he convinced me and I was completely blown away. Programmers were my heroes growing up.

  • cubano  12 years ago

    No..it wasn't doors.

    This was the MajorBBS, by a company called Galacticomm, which was the only BBS system that allowed realtime interactions and gave developers the ability to access shared memory that stored game state and player information.

    • alfiedotwtf  12 years ago

      Hang on... you worked on MajorBBS? Wow that's cool!

      I was fond of PCBoard though because most of the local l33t boards used it and they had PPEs :)

      Edit: sorry can't concentrate as I'm minding the kids and being distracted... you STARTED Galacticomm? That's awesome. I'm so happy my post has brought in the big guns to comment :)

      1 reply →

spdustin  12 years ago

Oh I really really want TradeWars to come back somewhere.

Thanks for popping in here - the OP and you both made me nostalgic for the BBS my friend and I ran on an Atari 800XL back in the day, with two acoustic coupling modems. Felt just like Matthew Broderick.