RemoteAccess

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

~ the last words ~

the man who wrote remoteaccess stopped writing it in may 1996 and went to run an internet service provider. that is the death certificate, in one sentence, and it is the same sentence as most of the bbs software on this site. the sysops did not lose to the internet so much as they got hired by it.

andrew milner published ra through wantree development in australia. it started in 1989 as a clone of quickbbs, adam hudson's package, and went out under shareware terms in 1990. within a couple of years it had passed the thing it copied, mostly on one point: ra could run several nodes at once under windows or desqview or os/2, so a board with two phone lines did not need two computers.

it was written in turbo pascal with assembly where it mattered, and the whole package fit in 829 kilobytes. it shipped in six languages. boards ran it across north america and europe, and down through south africa and the pacific, which for a program sold by post out of australia is a strange kind of distribution.

i was eleven when milner quit. the part of this i can speak to is the payment problem: registering shareware from turkey in that decade meant an international money transfer at a bank counter, which is a different transaction from typing a card number into a box. plenty of software arrived here in a state where nobody had paid for it and nobody could easily have paid for it either.

~ the record ~

~ the utility economy ~

over 1500 third-party utilities were written for remoteaccess. that number is the actual story of the product, because it means ra stopped being a program and turned into a platform that other people shipped against. the file listings, the door games, the message tossers and the statistics generators were mostly written by other sysops and traded around fidonet.

ra was the first bbs software to support the jam message base format, which milner helped design, and the first shareware board software to keep files in a database rather than in a plain text file sitting in each directory. the people who wrote the mailers it talked to, frontdoor and fastecho among them, ended up on its beta team. a shareware program in 1993 could be the center of an economy of a few hundred people who never met.

~ the author leaves ~

version 2.50 came out in may 1996 and milner walked. he was doing what his own customers were doing, since a sysop with a bank of phone lines and a customer list is most of the way to being an isp already. the windows and os/2 rewrite that was being discussed around 1995 got scrapped in 1996 for want of money and a reason.

in april 1997 he put the rights and the source code up for sale to the highest bidder. bruce morse in the united states bought it that december. morse shipped a year 2000 fix and some small repairs and added no features, and the last version, 2.62.2, is dated 25 october 2000. maintaining a dos bulletin board package in the year 2000 is not a business, it is a favor to the people still running one.

~ what got buried with it ~

remoteaccess never got a 32-bit version. a dutch developer started a visual basic rewrite called tcra32 that was abandoned inside two years, and the closest thing to a successor was elebbs, a clone that ran on dos and windows and os/2 and linux. mbse came later and went to linux only. the code itself never made the jump.

rapro.com, where the final version was hosted, does not resolve. neither does pcmicro.com, which held the north american support archives, nor elebbs.com. the boards named in the wikipedia article as running ra are in west virginia and zwolle and são paulo and a canadian area code, which is a decent map of where a program written in perth actually ended up.

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