Roy of Superior Art Creations

Roy/SAC ANSI art , ASCII art , Text art, Pixel art, Wikipedia, deviantART, Cirque Du Soleil and fun.

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PCBoard BBS Software

Categories: Artscene, BBS, history, Tools

Tags: Artscene

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Published on: June 8, 2007

Something else was even longer on my to-do list than the post about leveraging sites like deviantART for online marketing.

It has been on my list for over one year now and I also got finally around to do it. What am I talking about? The article to the PCBoard BBS Software at Wikipedia.

I extended the article significantly and also added a photo of the box of the software, which I took myself with my digital camera. You can see the picture here in the post as well. For the folks who don’t know, I used to run a BBS myself called “Closed Society”. I wrote about it on the homepage of my RoySAC.com website.

I used as BBS Software PCBoard. First via multiple PC’s under MS DOS and then all Notes on one machine running under IBM OS/2 Warp. The BBS was up 24/7 for over 2 years in my one bedroom studio. Did the noise of the running computers bother me when I was asleep? Actually quite the opposite.
I had a problem sleeping when the BBS was shut down and offline.

PCBoard was a great software and the best thing about it was the availability of its own script language to change the look, feel and behavior of the BBS. I wrote and published a bunch of tools myself. You can download all of them here.

I launched the BBS shorty after SAC was founded. The existence of the BBS did cause me to create more ANSI art than I would probably have done without it. So it was kind of a good thing to have a BBS of your own and do ANSI text art. It also did not make me depend on the time and talents of other artists hehe.

Clark Development, who created the software did unfortunately go bankrupt in 1997, the year when I shut down my BBS. They saw the reign of the BBS coming before most sysops at the time (including me) and started development on a product called PCBoard Metaworks, which was the attempt of the creation of a BBS like environment on the internet. The product was not finished to save the company. It died together with the company and never saw the light of day.

That’s fate I guess, but no whining will change anything and we have to move on.

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

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