So far John Lorance, the original sysop of TARDIS has not written anything for this section
about the time he ran TARDIS BBS (typical John), and so I will have to do the best I can.
TARDIS BBS was started in the dark ages of personal computing, when a IBM XT and a 10meg
Corvus external hard drive that you could use as a boat anchor were cutting edge equipment,
and a US Robotics 2400 baud modem was $600. It once ran on TANDY 1000 with no hard drive,
just one 1.44 meg floppy and a ram disk, yet it was still fast enough to use as a message only
BBS.
John originally started writing the custom BBS software, QBBS, as an replacement for RBBS. RBBS needed replacing because it was both almost impossible to use and crashed on a daily basis. The software went though many revisions, I personally remember it having Nulls at one time.
[Note:For those who don't remember, a Null put a pause at the beginning of each line so
printing terminals (gasp) would have time to reach the beginning of the next line
without losing characters. Ah, the good old days.]
The software and the BBS went though many revisions. The original TARDIS BBS was very
popular and the BBS software made some inroads in the local BBS scene (mainly against
WBBS) until John and I got sick of supporting it, which was a major headache and more
than a couple of teanagers wanted to do at the time (it was cutting into the time I
devoted to being a juvenile deliquent.)
Eventually John got sick of programming, and handed both the software and BBS over to me.
I renamed my system at the time, The Customs House, to TARDIS II BBS.
The BBS changed names several times after that, to Fear: The BBS (my favorite) and
eventually YoyoDyne BBS. I experimented with several other packages as well, including
FIDO and Wildcat, but always came back to the original software in the end.
I don't have much information from my old BBS(es) but I do still have the software
including Turbo Pascal 6.0 source code. This is available for free download from
the link below.
Tardis BBS ran for over 10 years, from about 1985 to 1995. It was one of the most popular
BBSes in the Valley of the Sun for many of them, and nurtured a wonderful group of regular
users and friends -- that remain friends to this day.
The BBS has been brought back, as a Telnetable BBS, and is a member of Dove.net. You can
click on the link below to connect, if you are running Windows 2000 or Windows XP. Other
Windows users should download a decent Telnet client, as the one that comes with Windows 98
and below is horrible.
The following client, Dave's Telnet, has been pre-configured to connect with TARDIS BBS.
Simply unzip it and run the program, no installer required.
Old BBS Source Code Site
