Jason Scott, here. An example of a very messy situation that may never be totally untangled, so consider all of this information in transit and still being researched.

The DarkStar BBS software was considered ahead of its time and impressive by many people who came into contact with it. Towards the middle of the 1990's, a beta version of the software came available, but was ultimately not released as a full production system. This caused a good number of hard feelings, including feeling defrauded or burned.

Jerry Thomas Hunter (J. Thomas Hunter, occasionally) wrote the software, and the names Ken and James McDowell have come up, although it is not clear in what capacity.

When trying to determine a version number for the files in darkstar.zip, I found a symbol table that's closely associated with compiled BASIC compilers of the era. -gb 08Nov21