DRBBS

DRBBS, like Sanctuary, was largely a board that was conducive to conversation. The group that frequented the board was largely part of the Omaha Computing Society. I have dinner with some of these folks from time to time.

When I first logged on to DRBBS, I had been using an alias (Cintaks Airer) on most of the C64 boards that I visited. I felt compelled to use my real name on DRBBS, so I did. However, the folks who maintained the board later told me that there was a bet among them that my given name ... Jim Lawless ... was actually a pirate-board alias.

DRBBS was written in C (Lattice C) and had been somewhat modeled on RBBS. It ran on a CP/M system. The software was later ported to run on the Commodore 128's CP/M and there were MS-DOS ports that ran on DOS gear. The BBS itself was just amazing. Some of the early participants were using teletype terminals so the very first thing that the board software did was ask "How many nulls do you need?"

The board software would send the specified number of nulls after each newline character so that the print arm had time to go back from the right-hand side of the paper to the left. As far as I can remember, this prompt greeted one during the whole of DRBBS's existence. I'm not sure if any of the other folks who ran the DRBBS software on other machines had the prompt, though. (I don't think they did. )

The board was very responsive and it had a lot of participants. The sysop and author of the software, jsw, is a big-time techie. He had DRBBS linking to Usenet feeds and had Internet mail before any other Omaha BBS's that I'm aware of. He also had a FIDONet mailer called YBBAT ( which had initially been called TABBY, but there seemed to be another program out there with that name. ) All of this happened on a 64K machine.

I really enjoyed that board until the BBS heyday sort of came to a close in the mid-90's. For a while, DRBBS was available via a Usenet feed but that also dwindled.

jsw was a participant in one of the first Omaha-based Internet Service Providers. The company was called GONIX - Greater Omaha public-access uNIX. It was where I stood up my first web pages. That company was sold to another provider.

I *think* that the BBS was going to be demonstrated as a telnet board at DefCon at some point. I'll have to find out if that's happened.

DRBBS - Dynamic Remote Bulletin Board System

DRBBS

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