I'm still alive and well, but during the past few weeks I have had no free time to devote to pcmicro.com. Thanks to Ron Slowic for maintaining pcmicro.com during my absense. It will be at least another two weeks before I will have time to devote to it myself, and in the mean time Ron will continue maintaining it.

Unfortunatly I have not had time to answer most of my email, but I will try to address a few of the more common questions people are asking now:

The most popular question seems to be "What is the future of RA, and when is RA32 coming out?" As many of you know, Andrew Milner got burned out on developing RA about 2 years ago during the 2.50 beta cycle. He had planned to have another company (Interscape) develop a 32-bit version of RemoteAccess. Unfortunatly that project was abandoned by Interscape soon afterwards. In a conversation with Walt Lane (Interscapes owner) I was told that andrew refused to sign the contract, though another employee of Interscape (Joel Ricketts) also stated that it was due to "a lack of funding".

Fortunatly RA32 is now being developed by Niels Schoot, A Dutchman with an excellent track record of developing 32-bit RA utilities. The full name of his product is "TotalControl RemoteAccess32", and it is not based on any of Andrew Milners code, though the first version will structurally identical to RA 2.50 for DOS. He expects to have a public release by the end of the year.

Andrew has offered to sell the RemoteAccess 2.50 source, and is currently in negotiations with Bruce Morse (1:324/122) to sell him the code. It is too early to say if the deal will actually go through or not.

Another popular question which many people are asking me, is "which BBS software do you recomend, or which is the best?" I obviously can't say what is best since thats a matter of opinion. There are several excellent packages still being developed today.

What I personally look for in a BBS package is functionality, for example a good menu editor and the ability for the sysop to customize their BBS to work in any manor they please. Good message base support is also important. A BBS program should support todays message base formats (eg: JAM, Hudson, and perhaps Squish) or I would not even consider it. Third Party support is also very important. The more utilities and doors that work with a BBS, the better. I also think a BBS needs to be supported by it's author. All BBS programs have a few bugs, but is the author activly working on fixing them, as well as bringing the BBS further into the "age of the internet"?

RemoteAccess and ProBoard are both excellent BBS packages, simular in many ways... including the fact that neither author appears to be activly developing them. :-( They are both still very popular today, but if development does not continue I expect they will soon be about as popular as SuperBBS (Which was also very simular, but the author abandoned development back in 1992).

For those of you who insist on running an underground-scene developed package, I suggest you have a look at Illusion 2.02. It's simular to Renegade/Telegard in many ways, but offers many advanced features such as modern message formats (JAM, Hudson, Squish), a good menu and language editor, system variables, special effects, and even has it's own programming language for IPL addons.

For those of you looking for a good freeware package, I suggest you take a look at Tornado BBS by Konstantin Klyagin. It's an excellent RA clone, currently available for either DOS or OS/2. It still needs some work to catch up to RA/PB, but it's getting there.

As for the future, there are some excellent BBS packages currently under development. There are two RA clones (RA32 by Niels Schoot, EleBBS by Maarten Bekers) which should be available within a few months. There is supposed to be a 32-bit version of ProBoard (another RA clone) released by Philippe Leybaert, but it appears that Philippe may no longer be working on it. It was reported that he recently got married, and no longer has as much free time. PB/32 was originally planned to be released to the public in December 1996.

Several people are telling me that "BBS's are dead, why bother with a BBS now that the internet has taken over". I agree that BBS'ing may never be as popular as it once was due to the internet gaining such popularity, and we are seeing many BBS companys fold before our eyes (such as Clark development, maker of PCBoard, and Galaticom, the maker of MajorBBS and worldgroup).

But I personally do not belive that BBS'ing is totally dead. Perhaps it is on a professional level, as companys can now offer their clients everything on a web/ftp page for a lot less money then it would cost them to maintain on a simular BBS. But the Hobbiest run BBS offers many things that one can not find on the internet. A local BBS tends to be more personal. Often the users personally know several of the other users on the BBS. The users have a sysop they can chat with and get help from. They tend to feel "at home" calling their favorate BBS's. In comparison the internet often feels like a huge galaxey of cold hard web pages.

I belive that the BBS software of the future will have to be designed to co-exist with the internet rather then avoid it. Users should be able send/recieve email, browse/search web and ftp sites, and chat not only with other users on the BBS, but also with IRC users at the same time. And I don't mean by having to use third party utilities.

Another important BBS feature is telnet, which allows anyone with an internet connection to call your BBS (A great way to get callers from other countries on your BBS). Any DOS BBS running Windows or OS/2 can already support telnet by using a driver (Such as vmodem which comes with SIO for OS/2, or Vcom or NetModem for Windows/95, or the NT version of WinFossil for NT users). BBS programs of the future such as RA32 and PB32 should have a telnet server built in.

One final question that people are asking "Why are there fewer BBS utils being added to pcmicro.com then there used to be?". The answer is simple... There are fewer BBS utilities being developed these days. Many of the shareware and freeware authors have moved on to other things. Even the freeware released by some popular RA groups (RAT for example) have given up on it. It's like a domino effect. If the BBS authors start to vanish, soon the third party developers dwindle as well.

Fortunatly some of the developers are at least making their shareware free. (For example, Pete Rocca recently changed several of his RA utils, including his Call-Back-Verifier, Upload Scanner, and other great utils) to freeware since he no longer has time to develop them. Rumor has it that the authors of JCQWK and FastFile may soon do the same as well.

Speaking of freeware, Dan Traczynsk continues to release some fantastic freeware BBS utilities. His latest creation, DCTEdit is a fantastic online message editor for RA/PB/QBBS/SBBS/TOR and simular BBS software. He is currently adding a spellchecker which will make it a compairable package with the famous IceEdit (which is no longer developed). Dan has several other great BBS utils he supports, all of which are freeware. :-)

I'm running out of time, but I will answer one last question. "When will PACIFIC COAST MICRO BBS reopen?". The answer is 'soon'. I had planned to get it online in September after the move, but I currently have too many projects and loose-ends to tie up before I will have enough free time to even check my mail... We will be beta testing several excellent BBS products soon, such as RA32, EleBBS, and DCTEdit to name a few.

Regards,   Mike      mike@pcmicro.com

Note from Ron Slowic:

People have been asking me where to find the software packages Mike mentioned above.

You can find links to most BBS programs here.
You can find Dan Traczynsk's BBS utilities here.
You can find Pete Rocca's BBS utilities here.
Additional BBS utility links can be found on pcmicro's RA and ProBoard> pages.

Hits since Oct. 6th 1997: