Third Party Developers / Independent Software Vendors (TPDs/ISVs)

One of the reasons so many purchased The Major BBS and Worldgroup was the wealth of add-on modules produced by a large, diverse group of developers. This started almost immediately, with Moonshae Telecomm, Logicom, and Tessier Technologies in south Florida in the mid to late 1980s. As the software grew in popularity, the list of developers and add-ons grew with it.

The add-on producers were initially referred to as TPDs - Third Party Developers. The first real set of add-ons were released for version 5.0 of The Major BBS. Back then, the Sysop had to have a full-source license to the BBS in order to compile add-ons in. While the TPD did not technically have to provide the source code to their add-on (they could have distributed object files for each supported compiler and each supported model), almost all add-ons were full source. This changed with the move to DLLs and the ability to add add-ons without having the source or compiling the system. Developers were then referred to as ISVs - Independent Software Vendors. They were assigned a three letter code by Galacticomm, and expected to use that code with their products.

This section of the project intends to:

• Capture as much information about as many of the developers as possible
• Locate and offer for download as many of the products produced as possible

ISVs

Here are a few ways into learning about the developers. Their products will be linked from their page. There will be some indexing by label in the future as the site content gets filled in, to provide some views into the module catalog.

Note: The ISVs are grouped by when they started or became known to system operators.

• Full List of Developers - a list of all of the developers that we are aware of
• Early TPDs - the early TPDs - from the version 5.x era
• v6/WG1/WG2 Era ISVs - the DOS DLL era ISVs, from version 6.x, Worldgroup 1, and Worldgroup 2.
• WG3 Era ISVs - the Win32 DLL era ISVs; Worldgroup 3.x