18 May
2017
18 May
'17
8:16 a.m.
On 5/18/17 9:45 AM, william degnan via cctalk wrote:
Strongest comment on this is that a Rainbow ran DOS (like most PCs of
the day)
and there was no security context and barely a foreground background as
part
of DOS.
All a DOS BBS was was a user interface that provided security by
requiring user/password
and limiting the commands usable. The easy was to do that was a version
of the CMD module
rewritten to not have things like RMDIR and DEL.
FYI BBSs were running on CP/M z80 boxes before that using BYE.
The closest OS to DOS is RT11, no security and the FB monitor can do
background.
IF the UI for RT11 was rewritten to disallow some utilities and what not
it could then
stand as a limited BBS. Myself I'd consider RSX or RSTS as a better
platform as you can
easily control user prives and issue accounts based on privs with
libraries for global
access to software.
The real question is why BBS? What is it trying to fix or enable?
Allison
There may have been Rainbow BBS programs, but I doubt anything for the
That's what I was thinking. I have some FidoNET files and mail from the
Rainbow. My guess the BBS would have been written in Pascal or C if for
the Rainbow (guess only) so if you wanted to attempt to port, after you
find a Rainbow BBS? I'd start with a Rainbow BBS disassembly/decompile and
see if you can convert to the PDP 11 running the same language/compile it.
11/34. You may have to write this.
That reminds me of a bit of obscure trivia...
Back in the early days of FidoNet, one or more of the Fido BBS sysops had
DEC Rainbows. The machines could run Fido just fine, but the serial port
address/port didn't follow the convention laid down by the IBM PC. At the
time, there were other MS-DOS compatibles that also had a similar issue
with the serial port and some of those folks wanted to run Fido.
Tom Jennings, Wynn Waggoner III(sp?) and Thom Henderson(sp?) got together
to create the FOSSIL standard.
FOSSIL is Fido Opus Seadog Serial Interface Layer and provided a mechanism
via INT 14 for any MS-DOS compatible computer to run any BBS or mailer
software that had FOSSIL support and a FOSSIL driver available for it.
FOSSIL continued to be a thing long after the issue of serial port
incompatibility was a thing of the past. In fact there's modern software
out there now such as NetFossil that telnet-enables software that can talk
to a FOSSIL driver.
The two popular FOSSIL drivers that I recall from back in the day were BNU
and Ray Gwinn's X00.
As an aside, if anyone has or knows where I can find the source code for
Opus BBS, I'd be interested in hearing from you!