PCBoard

» see clarkdev.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i was 13 in 1996 and just getting on dial-up at home in turkey. pcboard was already on the way out. fred clark had shipped the first version in 1983 from clark development company, and by 1995 it had sold over 50,000 licenses to sysops running paid dial-up boards across the united states. it was the high-end answer to "what software do i run if i want to bill people for time on my bbs."

the customer was the sysop, not the user. pcboard handled logins and message bases. door games hooked in through a documented door interface. ppe, the pcboard programming language, let sysops script anything the stock distribution did not cover. the catalog of third-party doors and ppe scripts was the real moat (close enough).

version 15.3 shipped in september 1996, the last full release. by then the open web had been pulling the sysop business apart for two years, america online was a flat-rate dial-up that did everything a sysop sold and did not need a local phone call. clark development announced source code and oem licenses in july 1996 trying to find a buyer, none stuck. the company went bankrupt in july 1997 and shut the office without warning to staff or customers.

the pcboard boards i could have called from ankara would have been long-distance to north america on an isdn-era phone bill. that was not a teenager budget. by the time i could have logged in, the open web was the only place worth going anyway (close enough).

~ the case file ~

~ the sysop math ~

the price model was tiered by line count. a small two-line board cost a few hundred dollars, a thirty-two-line installation cost real money (or whatever it was called). that math worked as long as sysops could charge their callers a per-minute fee. once aol's $20-a-month flat rate landed, the per-minute caller stopped existing.

in fairness, ppe was the technical part worth remembering. it was a real scripting language sitting inside a 1986 bbs server, sysops wrote login menus and door wrappers and registration forms in it without ever touching the core. for years it was the closest thing the dos bbs world had to a web framework.

~ what got buried with it ~

in those days. when clark development shut the office in july 1997, the staff found out the same morning the customers did. years of paid licenses turned overnight into unsupported software. some boards limped along on the binaries they already had, others migrated to wildcat or to mystic or to one of the smaller packages that outlived clark.

by 2000 the paid dial-up bbs in the united states was effectively gone (roughly). pcboard's legacy is not the binary, it is the proof that 50,000 paid sysops once existed at the same time. that part of the internet does not really come back.

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