Write Your Own Bulletin Board System (WYOBBS)

The first BBS I had ever developed was during high school back in 1982 into 1983. It was based upon the source code my father had purchased for me to help further my learn of programming…

My father had bought: (Y)(B)(B)(S).
Which stood for:

Your Bulletin Board System.

YBBS was far from complex, it was from a developer south of Tampa (where I lived at the time) and was sold as-is, it contained the basic features of

1. Initialize the Modem
2. Waiting for A Caller
3. Allow Caller to Create an Account
4. Scan for new Messages (private like eMail)
5. Scan for recent Uploads
6. Good to the Door Menu to play Text Games
7. Leave messages to other users
8. Chat with the System Operator.
9. YBBS was written in TRS-80 Basic.

As I became more and more serious about learning programming and understanding how software controlled my little computer. I became more curious of what was possible on my little Tandy Model-I computer. YBBS did not perform any automation, it simply asked the users (who were more Tech Savvy than today) if their terminal supported ANSI Color, 8bit Graphics, How many lines, and How many Columns (as not all machines were capable of 80 character wide displays).

Here I am, 37 years later releasing a product in full source (as-is) written in a language that I also wrote Modern Pascal. The tutorial pages for my compiler and script engine will explain why I wrote my own language… that is out of scope for this web site. Instead, we (me and my Alpha team) are here to explain how to Run Your Own BBS and potentially strike interest in you, so maybe you too will have interest in running a BBS and possibly learning programming since I include the source to the BBS package.

Legacy/X is the name we finally settled on for my BBS software. It operates 100% as a JIT (Just In Time Compiler) collection of Modern Pascal scripts. My test site currently has over 500,000 messages online and everything works lightning fast. Legacy/X is capable of operating as a *closed/private* system, or a fully *networked Fidonet node*. I include the full source to my *Fidonet Mailer*, *Fidonet Tosser* (to import and export messages), and even a *NNTP Usenet/Newsgroup Server* that works with the BBS message areas and user database for authentication. I offer all of this for free… again, to help spark the interest of up coming developers and with all of our new additions in functionality, people should enjoy calling (connecting) to any Legacy/X system hosted around the world.

Legacy/X Software is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. It currently operates on systems around the world. You can easily install it to work on your home or work computers, along with the inexpensive Raspberry Pi.

The era of a dedicated computer to run a BBS is gone. Today's operating systems can run multiple tasks. Legacy/X has a small footprint, so it co-exists well with other programs and it does not require a monitor so it can also run on an older computer sitting in the corner.