Project Background

A little history...

The Major BBS by Galacticomm was one of the most successful commercial bulletin board system (BBS) software packages. Galacticomm was the brainchild of a brilliant computer science pioneer, Tim Stryker. His innovative assembler library, called the Galacticomm Software Breakthrough Library (GSBL), allowed 256 simultaneous users to connect to a single DOS program on a single DOS-based computer. His innovative multi-modem hardware cards allowed people to have 8 or 16 modems on a single PC ISA card. The GSBL was written to take advantage of these multi-modem cards. The Major BBS was written as a demonstration of the possibilities inherent in the GSBL and the multi-modem cards. Due to positive reaction and interest from the public, it soon became apparent to Stryker that the BBS itself was a viable product.

Later, Stryker and Scott Brinker developed another breakthrough - the multiuser online adventure game. Several were developed - Fazuul (originally a standaline multiuser game), Quest of the Alchemists, Quest for Magic, Kyrandia, and more. Third-party developers began to sell add-on modules for the BBS. Other types of games were developed, too, with another core being Political/Economic (Pol/Econ) games, such as Logicom's Galactiwars, Moonshae's War of Worlds, M.B. Murdock's Galactic Empire, and more. Later, MUD and RPG games became popular.

As time went on, The Major BBS became one of the top commercial BBS systems on the market, with hundreds of online communities sprouting up from coast to coast, in Canada, and in other countries, too! With version 6 of the BBS, customers no longer had to purchase a source code license to add modules to the BBS. This led to even more ISV growth, and more BBSes coming on-line, as dedicated programmers were no longer necessary to run a large system.

In the early/mid 1990's, the Internet began to become more accessible to more people, and it slowly grew in popularity. Galacticomm, and the BBS world in general, was slow to react. An ISV developed a full TCP/IP services add-on (Vircom's Major TCP/IP), which allowed sysops to provide telnet, FTP, web, mail, IRC, and news services to their customers, as well as provide ISP dial-up services! Worldgroup v1 (The Major BBS's next version after 6.25) was released, eventually supporting NT and even UNIX (briefly), and provided an AOL-like Windows client, too.

Why The Major BBS Restoration Project?

Unfortunately, due to several factors, Galacticomm was on the decline. In the meantime, the Internet's popularity exploded, and access to the Internet grew exponentially. Unfortunately, as the Internet grew in popularity, BBSes lost customers, and most closed. The Major BBS was not immune to these events. Galacticomm was sold, the brilliant founder Tim Stryker committed suicide, and since then, things haven't been the same.

Strangely enough, as The Major BBS progressed, a lot of the early adventure and Pol/Econ games that were developed for v5.0 of the BBS were never "upconverted" to v6.x or to Worldgroup. Since the collapse of the BBS market, a vast amount of the games and add-ons have vanished; those few that are still sold don't sell well (with the exception of MajorMUD). We feel that this is a shame; and we hope to prevent these classic games and add-ons from being forgotten or lost.

In addition, a generation of people have grown up knowing only the Internet as a means of interaction by computer. We hope to enable people to experience what came before the Internet. And when they do, we wish to provide all of the background and historical information about the Galacticomm legacy.

Finally, much of the software has found it's way onto old hard drives, old floppies, and, in some cases, oblivion. We'd like to collect as much as possible, put it here, and let those who are either re-experiencing The Major BBS, or are interested in it for the first time, fire it up and give it a whirl. You never know...

Project Artifacts

Well, this wiki, for one. The forums. And the project manages the official Worldlink server for The Major BBS/Worldgroup at worldlink.themajorbbs.com. Here's a list of message bases.