Howard Moulton Jr. - March 6 Hi, My name is Howard and I came across your site while I was attempting to find the original CBBS CP/M software source. I actually marveled at discovering the noting that I was the original writer of RBBS. As far as I know, this was the only version of a BBS ever written in Basic. At the time, I did not know machine language and thought that my town should have a BBS too. It's name was derived from where I was living at the time - St. Johnsbury, VT. It was written on a TDL Xitan Z-80 S-100 machine, in TDL Xitan basic that ran on Micropolis 5.25 100tpi drives using the Micropolis operating system. The modem was a Bell Systems Dataset 202A found at a hamfest. You had to manually dial the number on your phone and wait until you heard the tone before switching over to the Dataset, similar to acoustic of the time. It would automatically answer calls without intervention. I had worked on it for about a week, trying to get it to behave in the likeness of Wards' CBBS. It did the store-and-forward part of messaging similar to CBBS except that it was considerabley slower than its ML counterpart, mainly due to the fact that the Micropolis drives were EXTREMELY slow - nearly 200ms track-track seek times. TDL Xitan basic made up for some of the loss in speed because it was written in Z80, not in 8080 like MBASIC (and I had beefed the TDL Z80 "ZPU" as they called it, to 3.5 MHZ). I finally called into CBBS and asked Ward to call mine and tell me what he thought after. He did. While his version could run circles around mine ten fold, this basic version could be easily ported to any machine that could imtrepret basic. My good friend at the time in Johnson City, NY, Charles, received a copy and adapted it to his setup without much change. He in turn released a copy to Bruce with my blessing, and history tells the rest. When Randy and Ward finally made CBBS available to the public, I bought the 2 disk set, even though I did not have 8" drives at the time. I received them and just stored them for future use. I think I may still have them in the original mailer that Randy used. They have never been inserted in a drive so I'm not so sure they're readable now. If I locate them, I'll send along a snap of them. So thanks for your efforts to track down how BBS's really blew into a frenzy there for a short while and actually paved the way to the internet. Good work on this site. I love it. 73's de W1ARQ Howard Moulton