The GSBL was really Galacticomm's first product. Without the GSBL, there really would not have been any of the other products!
The GSBL was a set of assembler routines that were compiled into a library (later a DLL). These routines allowed application developers to create realtime, multi-user applications on a single DOS machine. At first, the GSBL supported up to 32 users. In the late 1980s, it was expanded to 64 users, finally hitting 256 users with version 6 of The Major BBS in the early 1990s.
The company licensed the GSBL to developers, and had several licensees. There was even a source code licensee (although this was not commonly offered), who ported the GSBL for use on another platform. The GSBL versions were single letters (e.g., GSBL version H).
The need to demonstrate the abilities of the GSBL led founder Tim Stryker to develop The Major BBS version 1.0.
Eventually, The Major BBS took off. Stryker developed multi-modem cards - which were the only types of hardware the early Major BBS supported. Soon, the GSBL became the core of the new primary product – The Major BBS.
In 1994, Ken Maier and Mahesh Neelakanta approached Galacticomm about porting The Major BBS to UNIX platforms. Part of this activity led to the conversion of the GSBL to C code. This C-based GSBL was used in the UNIX version of MBBS 6.25, as well as for Worldgroup version 1.x, before being discontinued with the UNIX division. However, this same C-based GSBL became the core of the Win32 versions of Worldgroup 3.x.
One of the unique functions of the GSBL was the 18hz realtime BIOS clock interface. This functionality led to the FLASH Protocol and realtime ANSI modules for the BBS products. Unfortunately, this functionality was lost in the moves to UNIX and Win32 versions.