BBS software for the PDP 11

[Rod Smallwood]

On 18/05/2017 14:45, william degnan via cctalk wrote:
>>
>>
>> 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.
Tom wrote it in C .Lattice I think. He lost most of the source in a disk 
crash some years back.
I may a copy of the run time version on one of my Rainbows.

Rod

-- 
There is no wrong or right
Nor black and white.
Just darknessand light