[eric_arrr]

Fellow obscure BBS software author here.

Mine was Apocalypse / ApX (a hack of Havok, which was a hack of something else, which was a hack of Emulex/2, which I think was a hack of Forum?), around '92.

I, too, remember recruiting ACiD guys to help out with the menu art.

Ah, memories.

[exogeny]

Pfft, iCE > ACiD any day of the week!

[sk5t]

I was briefly a member of iCE, but can't deny JED's work for ACiD as the best there was...

[wiz21c]

Thumbs up ACiD! iCE! ASCII art, we had to be joking :-) I remember those multipages drawings... And, what was the tool ? TheDraw I guess ?

[jharger]

I was (briefly) part of a BBS "movie" group that made movies using "Commodore 64 Graphics" which were actually just made using the C64's unique character set. It would record back every cursor movement and character change, so you could make a really cheesy animation that often turned out to be really fun to watch.

You'd actually have to add delays by moving the cursor to allow enough time to read the captions/speech bubbles. It was pretty funny because it would be much slower on a 300 baud modem vs. a 2400 baud, so you had to be careful how you tuned your delays.

[bluefox]

TheDraw was OK, but ACiDDraw was awesome...

[rsync]

Weren't the vision/vision2/visionX based on forum hacks as well ? And celerity ?

All written in turbo pascal, right ?

[apaprocki]

Oblivion* also, Renegade was Pascal. This is a lot on the topic: http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/DOS/FORUM/

[sk5t]

AFAIK the canonical spelling of the progenitor software was FoReM. I never dabbled in VisionX but Celerity was definitely a FoReM derivative.

[mmccaff]

I loved collecting BBS Software at the time to look at what other people were doing.

Pretty much everything was either a Forum (Pascal) or WWIV (C) hack.

[rsync]

There was also "real" BBS software like wildcat and MajorBBS ...

I also remember some very, very active and high quality boards that ran citadel ... citadel was sort of the HN of the BBS world ... no ANSI, no fluff, just quick command keys and all high quality discussion.

[mmccaff]

Someone local to me had launched a pay-for-membership based MajorBBS that had something like 16 phone lines in. MajorBBS was the only thing I had seen that could support so many users at once. This was around the time I had stopped running my own BBS, before college.

This meant it could offer an active chat room, and it had a MUD game that everyone loved, called TeleArena.

For me, TeleArena was fun because I'd write scripts that would automate playing the game for me when I wasn't there.

[rsync]

I ran a 10-line worldgroup (majorbbs) in Boulder, circa 1996.

I had this weird software I licensed which let people play Doom against each other, over the phone line, simulating a local IPX network ... MPGS (Multiplayer game server) by a company called APCi.