Hey all,

I've been doing some research into what I'd call the "overlooked" side of BBS aesthetics -- the corporate and vendor support boards that companies ran in the late 80s and early 90s. Think Creative Labs, Novell, US Robotics, Hayes, Compaq, Dell, Microsoft, and similar operations. The boards where you'd dial in to grab a Sound Blaster driver or post a question about your NetWare configuration.

What I'm trying to track down is whether anyone has preserved screenshots or captures of what those menus actually looked like. Most of them were running TBBS, Wildcat! or PCBoard, and my assumption is that they used fairly minimal ANSI -- colored text menus, maybe a simple company name header, but nothing like the art scene boards? Functional and to the point?

I think that, these boards were treated as disposable infrastructure. Once the company moved to FTP sites and then the web, nobody thought to capture what those interfaces looked like before pulling the plug. The hobby boards, the art scene, the warez boards; those all had communities that cared about preserving that culture. But the vendor support boards it seems that it kind of slipped under the carpet, even though they were very much part of the BBS world. Millions of people dialed into them.

I've gone through the usual sources: the BBS Documentary materials, Boardwatch Magazine archives on the Internet Archive, the Wikimedia Commons BBS screenshots category, but actual captures of vendor board menus seem to be extremely scarce.

So I'm curious: does anyone here remember what these boards looked like firsthand? Even better, did anyone ever think to take a screen capture or print a screen before hanging up? I'd love to see what the actual menu structure and visual presentation was on a typical vendor support board circa 1992-1994. It's a corner of BBS history that I think deserves a little more documentation, and honestly, there's something about that clean design philosophy that I find worth studying.

Thanks for any leads.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2024/05/29 (Linux/64)
* Origin: The Montreal Greek Times

Greek Times wrote to All <=-

So I'm curious: does anyone here remember what these boards looked like firsthand? Even better, did anyone ever think to take a screen capture
or print a screen before hanging up?

Picture an ASCII representation of the company logo, lots of
boilerplate, and ASCII menus reminiscent of PCBoard. That's what
I recall from calling AST, PC Magazine's BBS, 3com and some others in
the 1990s.

I inherited an AST AboveBoard, one of those interesting memory board
plus serial/parallel. It had a socketed serial chip, so I could get one
of those 16550s and run the BBS off of it.

The board had 3 separate DIP switch fields, if memory serves, and no
silk-screened indications on the board. I was able to download the
manual as a txt file and thought that was pretty cool.

Around that time, I was setting up an interactive voice response
faxback system for my company, they weren't convinced that enough
people had modems at the time for a BBS!


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Re: Looking for screenshots/a
By: Greek Times to All on Sun Feb 22 2026 11:00 am

So I'm curious: does anyone here remember what these boards looked like firsthand? Even better, did anyone ever think to take a screen capture or print a screen before hanging up? I'd love to see what the actual menu structure and visual presentation was on a typical vendor support board circa 1992-1994. It's a corner of BBS history that I think deserves a little more documentation, and honestly, there's something about that clean design philosophy that I find worth studying.

Thanks for any leads.

You might try looking through some of the old shareware CD's, Some of those CD's hold a lot of historical BBS gold.

Try http://cd.textfiles.com/sv/

I have spent some time going through some of these and found a couple of my old programs and of a few BBS Lists I used to make and upload to other BBS's.

Denn

...Unable to locate Coffee -- Operator Halted!

---
þ Synchronet þ the Outwest BBS - outwest.synchro.net - Home of BBSBASE 6.0

Re: Looking for screenshots/a
By: Greek Times to All on Sun Feb 22 2026 11:00 am

I've been doing some research into what I'd call the "overlooked" side of BBS aesthetics -- the corporate and vendor support boards that companies ran in the late 80s and early 90s. Think Creative Labs, Novell, US Robotics, Hayes, Compaq, Dell, Microsoft, and similar operations. The boards where you'd dial in to grab a Sound Blaster driver or post a question about your NetWare configuration.

What I'm trying to track down is whether anyone has preserved screenshots or captures of what those menus actually looked like. Most of them were running TBBS, Wildcat! or PCBoard, and my assumption is that they used fairly minimal ANSI -- colored text menus, maybe a simple company name header, but nothing like the art scene boards? Functional and to the point?

I didn't get any screen captures of corporate BBSes; I only remember ever calling one corporate BBS, and it was in a different state, so there were long-distance phone charges involved. I remember it was like your assumption, it didn't look fancy, but I believe I got what I needed from their BBS (either an updated version of a driver/program or some information).

Nightfox

---
þ Synchronet þ Digital Distortion: digitaldistortionbbs.com

Re: Looking for screenshots/a
By: Greek Times to All on Sun Feb 22 2026 11:00 am

Hey all,

I've been doing some research into what I'd call the "overlooked"
side of BBS aesthetics -- the corporate and vendor support boards
that companies ran in the late 80s and early 90s. Think Creative
Labs, Novell, US Robotics, Hayes, Compaq, Dell, Microsoft,
and similar operations. The boards where you'd dial in to grab a
Sound Blaster driver or post a question about your NetWare
configuration.

What I'm trying to track down is whether anyone has preserved
screenshots or captures of what those menus actually looked like.
Most of them were running TBBS, Wildcat! or PCBoard, and my
assumption is that they used fairly minimal ANSI -- colored text
menus, maybe a simple company name header, but nothing like the art
scene boards? Functional and to the point?

I think that, these boards were treated as disposable infrastructure.
Once the company moved to FTP sites and then the web, nobody thought
to capture what those interfaces looked like before pulling the
plug. The hobby boards, the art scene, the warez boards; those all
had communities that cared about preserving that culture. But the
vendor support boards it seems that it kind of slipped under the

There's nothing special about it. they were boring stock bbses.
you could download a few things. i called every one i could find.
there wasn't any support on the msg bases. these places want you to call in voice for support. if you emailed the sysop they didn't reply.


it's not overlooked. there's nothing to look at.


--
"Before using Wildcat....This Company did not have a convenient way of
looking after some of the richest clients in the world...Now we do!"
---
þ Synchronet þ ::: BBSES.info - free BBS services :::

Re: Looking for screenshots/a
By: Greek Times to All on Sun Feb 22 2026 11:00 am

So I'm curious: does anyone here remember what these boards looked like firsthand? Even better, did anyone ever think to take a screen capture or pr a screen before hanging up? I'd love to see what the actual menu structure a

Others may have responded about this already. I wasn't on many of these, but the few that I did dial into were always completely stock. Companies, as far as I saw, didn't customize their BBSes at all. If they did, it was to disable features. They might've set a color different sometimes, if there was that option ;). Log in to a stock Wildcat! install, and that's what it looked like.

---
þ Synchronet þ TIRED of waiting 2 hours for a taco? GO TO TACOPRONTO.bbs.io

Re: Looking for screenshots/a
By: phigan to Greek Times on Wed Feb 25 2026 07:41 am

So I'm curious: does anyone here remember what these boards looked like
firsthand? Even better, did anyone ever think to take a screen capture or
pr a screen before hanging up? I'd love to see what the actual menu
structure a

Others may have responded about this already. I wasn't on many of these, but the few that I did dial into were always completely stock. Companies, as far as I saw, didn't customize their BBSes at all. If they did, it was to disable features. They might've set a color different sometimes, if there was that option ;). Log in to a stock Wildcat! install, and that's what it looked like.

Every "corporate" BBS I ever logged into was just stock WildCat or MajorBBS. Later, they became stock Worldgroup.

I want to say one I called ran Excalibur, but I don't think that one was around for very long.

I can't remember what companies ran what, though.

...All great discoveries are made by mistake.

---
þ Synchronet þ War Ensemble BBS - The sport is war, total war - warensemble.com

Re: Looking for screenshots/a
By: DaiTengu to phigan on Wed Feb 25 2026 10:35 am

Every "corporate" BBS I ever logged into was just stock WildCat or MajorBBS. Later, they became stock Worldgroup.

From what I remember, MajorBBS had some products & software features to enable easily having a bunch of phone lines for a dialup BBS. I had used some MajorBBS boards in my area in the early 90s that had a bunch of phone lines, with active multi-node chat rooms. I remember seeing some hardware they offered that allowed a lot more serial ports than were usually offered on a PC.. From what I remember, a typical IBM-compatible PC had bulit-in support for up to 4 serial ports (and a couple of them shared IRQs, from what I remember, so if you wanted to use all 4 simulteneously, you had to re-configure their IRQs). But I recall seeing that the company that made MajorBBS offered some hardware that allowed a lot more serial ports, and their MajorBBS software naturally supported that. I'm not sure how the hardware accomplished that, since typically there were limited IRQs available.

Nightfox

---
þ Synchronet þ Digital Distortion: digitaldistortionbbs.com

Nightfox wrote to DaiTengu <=-

From what I remember, MajorBBS had some products & software features to enable easily having a bunch of phone lines for a dialup BBS. I had
used some MajorBBS boards in my area in the early 90s that had a bunch
of phone lines, with active multi-node chat rooms. I remember seeing
some hardware they offered that allowed a lot more serial ports than
were usually offered on a PC.. From what I remember, a typical IBM-compatible PC had bulit-in support for up to 4 serial ports (and a couple of them shared IRQs, from what I remember, so if you wanted to
use all 4 simulteneously, you had to re-configure their IRQs). But I recall seeing that the company that made MajorBBS offered some hardware that allowed a lot more serial ports, and their MajorBBS software naturally supported that. I'm not sure how the hardware accomplished that, since typically there were limited IRQs available.

Digiboards! They rocked. I had a 16 port digiboard running a dial-up
WAN back in those days - I was working for a large retailer with 100
stores. The POS system in the stores was essentially a DOS box, and
when they shut down at night, it ran a batch file we wrote to zip up
sales, credit card data and inventory data, then send it to the hub.
The hub system was an OS/2 box running a package called Excellenet,
using a 16 port digiboard.

There was a special driver, might have used int14h, a protocol used to
share modems over the LAN. The digiboard had 386 processors on it,
it did most of the processing on-board. We had 16 modems on it, and
when the east coast stores would close, they'd all be busy.

The whole system reminded me of FTN, I thought you could reproduce most
of it with FrontDoor and some batch files.



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Re: Looking for screenshots/a
By: Nightfox to DaiTengu on Wed Feb 25 2026 12:17:59

From what I remember, MajorBBS had some products & software features to enable easily having a bunch of phone lines for a dialup BBS...I remember seeing some hardware they offered that allowed a lot more serial ports than were usually offered on a PC...I'm not sure how the hardware accomplished that, since typically there were limited IRQs

MagorBBS used special plug-in cards that handled all the back-end stuff. You'd have a card that plugged into your PC which had a cable coming out the back, which in turn had a number of other connectors that would plug into your modems. The more expansion slots you had in your PC, the more phone lines you could set up.

---
þ Synchronet þ End Of The Line BBS - endofthelinebbs.com

Re: Looking for screenshots/a
By: DaiTengu to phigan on Wed Feb 25 2026 10:35 am

Every "corporate" BBS I ever logged into was just stock WildCat or MajorBBS. Later, they became stock Worldgroup.

There were some bit corporations/organizations (e.g. EFF, ZyXEL) that ran Synchronet way back when too, but yeah, they were usually completely stock and had just the bare minimum content.
https://wiki.synchro.net/_detail/museum:ads:1995-08_accept_the_inevitable.png --
digital man (rob)

Steven Wright quote #3:
Half the people you know are below average.
Norco, CA WX: 83.7øF, 43.0% humidity, 1 mph W wind, 0.00 inches rain/24hrs
---
þ Synchronet þ Vertrauen þ Home of Synchronet þ [vert/cvs/bbs].synchro.net

Re: Looking for screenshots/a
By: Nightfox to DaiTengu on Wed Feb 25 2026 12:17 pm

re-configure their IRQs). But I recall seeing that the company that made MajorBBS offered some hardware that allowed a lot more serial ports, and their MajorBBS software naturally supported that. I'm not sure how the hardware accomplished that, since typically there were limited IRQs available.

MajorBBS didn't use the IRQ's that are normally used for serial ports. It used the IRQ that was hooked up to the programmable interval timer, which normally ran at 18.2 times per second. It would change the interval so it ran often enough to get a byte from the serial port in time. So for 1200 baud, it'd be at least 120 times per second. And each time the timer IRQ triggered, it would loop through all the serial ports. If there was a new character to read, it would add it to the input buffer. If the port was ready for a character to be written, it would take it from the output buffer and send it to the serial port.

To keep the system clock from running too fast, at the end of the interrupt service routine, it would only call the previously attached ISR at every Xth invocation such that it would only get called at the expected 18.2 times per second. So it set the programmable interval timer to a multiple of 18.2 so that it could easily divide it back out.

---
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Nightfox wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

It sounds like those Digiboards were pretty serious units. I think it would have been fun to run a multi-line BBS using one of those, but I didn't have the money at the time.

Yeah, I would have sprung for more disk space and more backups, too.
I wish I had more data from the '90s.



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DaiTengu wrote to Gamgee <=-

But, finally, after 30-some years, I have a USR modem! Who's laughing now, US-Robotics?

I was decommissioning an AS/400 a couple of jobs ago, and couldn't help
but take home the USR Courier DS modem they'd used for remote support.
I'd wanted one for so long back in the dial-up days but settled for
Sportsters, the consumer level models that never sat even with a serial
port cable plugged in.

Alas, I had no phone line or place to call with it.





... Only the machine keeps using time to make time to make time.
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Mortar wrote to Nightfox <=-

MagorBBS used special plug-in cards that handled all the back-end
stuff. You'd have a card that plugged into your PC which had a cable coming out the back, which in turn had a number of other connectors
that would plug into your modems. The more expansion slots you had in your PC, the more phone lines you could set up.

&TOTSE, the Temple of the Screaming Electron, took a different approach.
The sysop ran Remote Access software, and kept adding 386SX boxes. He
had a couple of baker's racks with, at one point, 13 nodes running, all
beige desktop boxes, all wired up to old thinnet ethernet.

He rented an office space for his business with utilities included. :)



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DaiTengu wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

I'm glad I didn't wait until this year, it would have cost me $1000
just for the RAM!

I have 64GB of DDR4 RAM in my desktop box, think I'm sticking with it
(10th gen i7) for a while. I've thought about swapping it with my homelab
server (7th gen i5) but my nicer video card won't fit in its SFF case.





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Digital Man wrote to Nightfox <=-

Synchronet supported Digiboards (Steve Deppe added the support for
their int14h driver), but I don't think a lot of (Synchronet) sysops
used them. Usually, it wasn't too hard to get 3 or 4 IRQs available for COM ports

Says the guy who wrote BBS software! As a meer caller, pre
plug-and-play, I remember trying to get a modem, a serial mouse, an
ethernet card and a parallel printer all working at once. I finally had
to tape a note with the IRQ and port settings to the inside of the
case and start all over when I was given an Apple Laserwriter (which
only had a serial port)




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Re: Re: Multiline BBSes
By: poindexter FORTRAN to Mortar on Fri Feb 27 2026 07:52 am

Mortar wrote to Nightfox <=-

MagorBBS used special plug-in cards that handled all the back-end stuff. You'd have a card that plugged into your PC which had a cable

&TOTSE, the Temple of the Screaming Electron, took a different approach.
The sysop ran Remote Access software, and kept adding 386SX boxes. He

I ran a CNET amiga BBS and ended up using a PME30 30 serial port ras. I had 30 supra modems zip tied to chicken wire suspended in a 2x4 frame allowing air flow all around each modem. Then coax ethernet linked it to the BBS and a T1. Added a slackware box to feed ppp/slp accounts. The amiga was easy to set to this configuration, just change the port from serial.device to telnet.device and later telser.device.

This was later replaced with multiple Bay Network 5000 chasis boxes stuffed with 48 port cards that were fed via the fiber cabinets that had dial toned backhauled from 36 dialing areas throught northern california. The BBS became forgotten mostly at that point.

---
þ Synchronet þ datGSguy.com - telnet 64/128/6502 ssh 2222 Rlogin and Web

Nightfox wrote to Lonewolf <=-

Re: Re: Looking for screenshots/a
By: Lonewolf to poindexter FORTRAN on Sat Feb 28 2026 09:11 pm

You can buy a PCIe extension ribbon cable and mount your GPU outside of your SFF case. I used one and it worked well.

You'd also need to get power to the GPU, requiring some extension
cables for the power connectors. It would be interseting to set up a
GPU externally that way.

I seem to recall seeing some GPUs now that use USB 3.x for a high-speed connection, which would be easier to connect to a PC. And I'm not
sure, but I imagine that for power, those probably include a power
supply so that you can plug them into a wall power outlet.

Yeah, the reality is that there's only one game that I really want the
my higher-end card for is War Thunder, and I've stopped playing as much
while I've been busy with other things. My SFF system has a GT 1030
that's better than the built-in video that should suffice for most (and
I played WT on an i7-4790 with it and got 35-40 fps on custom settings)

I get around 140 fps on the high setting now.

I have a lot of stuff, and want to avoid buying any more in 2026 by
making the most of what I have.



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Lonewolf wrote to Nightfox <=-

But then I came across a Dell Workstation 5820 on eBay that has an i9-10900X 3.70 Ghz Zeon 10 core CPU and 4 PCIe slots with two 8 pin
PCIe power connectors.

I love Dell workstations - they're built like tanks and most of the
disassembly is screwless. I supported a couple of generations of them
at work and had a T3400 that ran for 10 years or so...




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