About The Major BBS Restoration Project

[Questman]

About The Project

The Major BBS by GALACTICOMM was, for a time, one of the most successful commercial bulletin board system (BBS) software packages on the market. At its peak, it collected several hundred thousand dollars per month in revenue. It was the brainchild of a brilliant computer science pioneer, Tim Stryker. Through his innovative assembler library called the GALACTICOMM Software Breakthrough Library (GSBL), it was possible to have 32 (later 64, then 256!) simultaneous users connected to a single DOS program on a single DOS-based computer.

Later, Stryker and Scott Brinker developed another breakthrough - the multiuser online adventure game. Several were developed - Fazuul, Quest of the Alchemists, Quest for Magic, Kyrandia, Alchemy II, and more. Third Party developers began to sell add-on modules for the BBS. Other types of games were developed, too, with another core being Political/Economic (PolEcon) games, such as Logicom's Galactiwars, Moonshae's War of Worlds, M.B. Murdock's Galactic Empire, and more.

As time went on, The Major BBS became one of the top commercial BBS systems on the market, with hundreds of online communities sprouting up from coast to coast, in Canada, and in other countries, too! With version 6 of the BBS, customers no longer had to purchase a source code license to add modules to the BBS. This led to even more ISV growth.

In the early/mid 1990's, the Internet began to become more accessible to more people, and it slowly grew in popularity. GALACTICOMM, and the BBS world in general, was slow to react. An ISV developed a full TCP/IP services add-on (Vircom's Major TCP/IP), which allowed SysOps to provide telnet, ftp, web, mail, irc, and news services to their customers, as well as provide ISP services! WorldGroup v1 (The Major BBS's next version after 6.25) was released, eventually supporting NT and even UNIX (briefly), and provided an AOL-like Windows client, too.

Unfortunately, due to several factors, GALACTICOMM was on the decline. In the meantime, the Internet's popularity exploded, and access to the Internet grew exponentially. Unfortunately, as the Internet grew in popularity, BBSes lost customers, and most closed. The Major BBS was not immune to this. Galacticomm was sold, the brilliant founder Tim Stryker committed suicide, and since then, things haven't been the same.

Strangely enough, as The Major BBS progressed, a lot of the early adventure and Pol/Econ games that were developed for v5.0 of the BBS were never "upconverted" to v6.x or to WorldGroup. Since the collapse of the BBS market, a vast amount of the old games and addons have vanished; those few that are still sold don't sell well (with the exception of MajorMUD). We feel that this is a shame; and we hope to prevent these classic games and addons from being forgotten or lost.