WWIV

The WWIV Bulletin Board System was one of the most popular dialup computer hosting systems in the online world during the late seventies and early eighties. One of its most unusual features was a proprietary networking system, allowing tens of thousands of systems running the software to link themselves together into various networks.

This system started out as a single BBS in St. Louis, MO, run by Wayne Bell, who wrote and compiled it in BASIC. Because it was in an interpreted language, though, it attracted the interest of various other potential SysOps, who obtained copies to modify and run for their own boards.

Eventually, for practical reasons, Bell switched to Pascal, creating a compiled version of the BBS but distributing the source code for it to anyone who was interested in their own BBS. Eventually he moved to C++ and added networking, allowing all WWIV boards to link to each other, and those who paid to recompile with the source code and to link to the main network, WWIVNet, which soon connected thousands of boards together.

This software even spawned clones, as with VBBS, a system based on Visual Basic but using a WWIV user interface and compatible with WWIV networking.