Renegade (BBS)

Renegade is a freeware bulletin board system (BBS) written for IBM PC-compatible computers running MS-DOS that gained popularity among hobbyist BBSes in the early to mid 1990s. It was originally written by Cott Lang in Pascal, based on the source code of Telegard, which was in turn based on the earlier WWIV.

On April 23, 1997, after the decline of BBS popularity, Lang ceased development work on Renegade and passed it on to two Renegade BBS utility authors: Patrick Spence and Gary Hall. Spence and Hall maintained Renegade for three years, releasing three updates with their new, ordinal date version scheme. Jeff Herrings, another former third-party software developer, was handed the source by Spence in January of 2000 after offering help when he found there was no Y2K-compliant version of the software. Herrings released a public alpha version of Renegade in March of 2000 addressing Y2K-compliance problems. He stepped down as active programmer in October of 2001 citing lack of time and desire. Herrings released his Y2K-compliant source code to the public via the Dreamland BBS in September of 2005 and stated he did so because he felt betrayed by Patrick Spence regarding a personal matter and as such felt it was right for the source to be released to the general public.

Spence eventually handed the program over to Corey Snow in 2002, who intended to release an open-source, Java-based clone of the software which never saw the light of day.

Current Information

T.J. McMillen received the source code in October 2003 from Patrick Spence in a plea to have some much need features added to Renegade. McMillen then added the help of Chris Hoppman, one of the few remaining Renegade BBS's around. Together they released a few updates which addressed bugs and debuted some new features before Hoppman lost interest. Hoppman stepped down from the project in 2004 and is no longer involved. This left McMillen, once again, alone to carry on the Renegade code.

With little free time, Renegade idled for more than a year until April 2006 when McMillen (also known as Exodus) added the talent of Lee Palmer to the Renegade team to replace Hoppman. Palmer (also known as Nuclear) is a former third-party software developer for the T.A.G. Bulletin Board System.

Current testing and coding is in the works on another update and some third-party utilities for the current version of Renegade. The current work is now being coded under "The Renegade Development Team" name, which mainly includes McMillen and Palmer, but leaves the door open if others are needed.

The Renegade Team has released an update on June 30 2006 and another update on September 30 2006 as well as a full release for this cycle version. Updates are trying to be made and released every 90 to 120 days to help keep interest and the project alive.

Current releases can be found @ telnet://ttb.slyip.com or most any other fine telnet BBS.

Updated News is posted on the Renegade BBS Home Page @ http://www.renegadebbs.net

BBS's running Renegade

* [telnet://ttb.slyip.com The Titantic BBS Telnet] , Home of the Renegade BBS Software
* [telnet://weve.gotgeeks.com Geekhaven BBS]

External links

* [http://www.renegadebbs.net/ Renegade Development Team site]
* [http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/software/IBM/DOS/RENEGADE/ The BBS Software Directory – Renegade]
* [http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/DOS/RENEGADE/herrings.txt Herrings' letter of resignation]
* [http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/DOS/RENEGADE/rgy2ksrc.txt Herrings' note regarding the release of the source code]
*Current releases can be found at telnet://ttb.slyip.com