RBBS turns out to be one of my great personal embarassments of my own experience of the history of BBSes. While I though the BBS was specifically written by Tom Mack and nobody else, it turns out that the program has an unbelievably rich history going to before IBM PCs into the world of CP/M. It gets somewhat muddled but names definitely appear, such as Howard Moulton, Bruce Ratoff, and so on, who all did work on this program in the late 1970's, long before the IBM PC even existed. It was in the form of a BASIC program, meaning porting it to the new platform is much simpler. From its time on PCs it gains even more momentum and additional features, making it the well-known program it is in History. But the initial strides are made in the CP/M world, and should not be forgotten.

RBBS appears to have a predecessor/ancestor in a program called SJBBS, which Howard Moulton declares to be the source of the program which he converts from. There are only two SJBBSes I can find: Bearsville Town SJBBS in Bearsville, NY, and Johnson City SJBBS in Johnson City, NY.

C. R. Bryan III writes "There was a version of RBBS for CP/M: RBBS 4.1 edit 02. Written in C, it compiled under BDS C on CP/M machines. I ran it on my Ampro Little Board 1-A (a Z80 single-board computer that bolted onto the side of a 5-1/4" floppy drive and came with CP/M 2.2 with a ZCPR3 CCP; the 1-B had a SCSI port and could use a hard drive in 5M partitions) 1984-86 using BYE's ring-back option (ring once and hang up; ring again in 30 seconds and the BBS would be booted and waiting... made for some panicky file-saves if I was doing some editing at the time)."