BBS software for the PDP 11

william degnan billdegnan at gmail.com
Thu May 18 08:45:15 CDT 2017


>
>
>
> There may have been Rainbow BBS programs, but I doubt anything for the
>> 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!
>
>
>
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.


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