Mike's BBS

MBBS (Mike's BBS) was a popular BBS system in the Nordic countries during the mid-1990s. It was created by a team of Oslo-based enthusiasts, led by Mike Robertson. As many BBS systems of that era, it was only available for the DOS platform. Since one process could only handle one node, multitaskers such as DESQview or Microsoft Windows were necessary in order to run multi-node BBSes. MBBS had to use the only viable means of interprocess communication under DOS, namely to read and write to a set of files in a common subdirectory. Since these files were accessed very often, many SysOps moved them to a RAM disk.

MBBS' user interface was a command line interface where commands could be "stacked". This means that instead of typing a command, being asked to supply some parameters, and then typing another command, one could type them on one command line separated by a space or semicolon. An example is m sa g y, which expands to "marks, save message pointers, goodbye, yes". This user interface was copied in Kim Heino's later BBBS system, to the degree that most valid MBBS command strings do the same in BBBS.

MBBS was released as uncrippled shareware by Gallagher & Robertson. It is now discontinued, and its final version, 10.4, was released in 1996.

Mike's BBS was also the name of the MBBS-run BBS, operated by Mike Robertson, which in many ways served as a social hub of the Norwegian BBS community of the 1990s.

REFERENCES

• An example of a BBS list from the mid-90s, showing MBBS' popularity [1]