Excalibur BBS

~ the obit ~

A bulletin board was a telephone number, and that single fact decided who could ever use one. Excalibur boards ran in the United States, mostly on American local calling plans, and reaching one from Turkey would have meant an international call billed by the minute, just to type at strangers. Language was never the barrier with American boards. The barrier was the phone company, and it was absolute in a way that nothing on the web has been since.

What the software did was ambitious for 1993. Excalibur Communications, Inc. of Tulsa, Oklahoma shipped a bulletin board system for Windows that was graphical all the way through, with no text mode underneath it. Callers did not use a terminal program. They installed the Excalibur Client and connected with it, by modem or later over TCP/IP, and what came up was a windowed environment with screens you navigated by clicking links.

Sysops extended it with plugins. Some of those were games with animation and sound. Others handled file searching, or mail that covered both local and internet addresses, or a gateway out to FidoNet. Some boards piped WAV files as background music, built around a jukebox interface where the caller picked the track. Taken together it is the best surviving look at how an online service got built by people who took for granted that you would install their software before you could reach them.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

NCSA Mosaic 1.0 came out in 1993 as well. The two ideas looked comparable for a couple of years, and on features Excalibur was arguably ahead: the graphics and the messaging were already working, while the early web was gray pages with inline images. A caller on a good Excalibur board in 1994 was getting a richer experience than a caller on most of the web that year.

~ the cracks ~

The client was what sank it, and it sank it precisely because it was good. Every board you wanted to visit needed that software on your machine and a number to dial, and the operator of each board had to buy and run the server half. A browser pointed anywhere. You installed it once and every site in the world was already compatible, including sites whose authors did not know your browser existed.

So the comparison was never really about which experience was better in 1994. The web did not out-design Excalibur. It out-distributed it.

~ the long tail ~

Excalibur Communications ceased operations in 1999 and no one picked up the software, so it has had no support for over twenty-five years. It also stopped running: the code has programming limitations that break it on Windows XP and anything newer, which means the graphical bulletin board that was ahead of the web in 1994 is one of the harder things on this site to see working today.

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