Robert Maxwell writes "The software was my first significant project in Borland's Turbo Pascal; when I received my copy of TP Version 2.0, I thought "This would be great to write a BBS in!". It was written from the start to be able to run on either CP/M or MS-DOS, since Borland had Turbo Pascal releases for both. I knew a few BBS Sysops in my area, and heard about their problems with crashes and security, so I built the modem support into the software: that way, if anyone crashed my BBS, they would be left with no response from the other end, instead of a command prompt. I saw a few attempts to break in, but I was the only one that ever crashed my own system, and it ran happily for weeks at a time unattended.

"Once the BBS was running, I announced its existence on Borland's SIG (Special Interest Group) on Compuserve, and I got a response from Bela Lubkin, one of the Borland Sysops there that they had implied to a writer for Compuserve's monthly magazine that they had a BBS on file for download and they didn't. Could I post mine? So, after a bit of tidying up, the version 1.0 Pascal source became a public release in 1985."

"I ported the BBS from my Kaypro to a used Osborne-1 because I wanted my bigger display back. The remote callers weren't bothered by the O-1 having a tiny 5" screen. A music writer in Vancouver also set up a BBS on his Compaq Portable with the MS-DOS version I ported. I also knew of several other systems - they're listed in the BBSLIST.TXT file in the Version 1.05 distribution package."

"When I was transferred from Vancouver to the Toronto area in late 1986, the TurboBBS project died, sort of. I received a check from Australia and it was also ported to Nokia's MicroMikko II computer in Finland - I received shareware contributions from the Finns, who had promised them if they sold any copies, months after my BBS has gone down. Evidently, they sold three."

"I ported a version to the TI Professional PC (MS-DOS, but with a non-standard serial interface) for a Michigan user group. There was a period when I could do a search on the Web and find a number of TurboBBS hits out of Russia - I suspect that the Finnish version had hopped across the border. Bless them, they kept crediting me. As you already have on-site, the software took on a life of its own in the US, and I was even contacted by one of the people working on a version, asking some questions."

"I still have my Kaypro, and it still has its hard drive, and TurboBBS is still there, just waiting to start up again."