Searchlight BBS

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

~ the eulogy ~

in 1998 i plugged a 14.4k modem into the wall and dialed an isp, because by then that is what a modem was for. searchlight spent its entire useful life on the other side of that switch, in the years when a modem called another person's computer rather than a company's. the phone number was the address.

frank larosa wrote the first version in 1985 for the trs-80, in microsoft level iii basic, and sold it himself under a company name he made up for the purpose. in 1987 he rewrote the whole thing in turbo pascal for the pc and put it out as shareware. it spread far enough and fast enough that it became a fixture in boardwatch magazine and a regular presence at the bbs conventions that ran across the united states in the early nineties.

this was a software business of a kind that has mostly stopped existing. one person wrote the code, answered the support mail and cashed the registration checks. the product it competed against was pcboard, which had a company behind it, and wildcat, which had mustang. searchlight had larosa.

turkey had a board scene in those years, small and mostly in the big cities, and calling one meant paying for a metered local call while your household phone line went dead. i was in primary school for the whole of searchlight's good period. by the time a modem in our house was mine to use, the machine on the other end of the line belonged to an isp and every board that mattered had already turned off its answering line.

~ the dossier ~

~ the full screen ~

almost every bulletin board of the period scrolled. the board printed a menu, you typed a letter, it printed the next thing, and the transcript of your session read top to bottom like a receipt. searchlight instead drew a screen and put a cursor in it, with a full screen text editor for writing messages and arrow keys that moved you around rather than a prompt that asked you to choose.

over 2400 baud that is expensive. redrawing a screen costs characters, and characters cost seconds, and seconds cost money on a metered line. searchlight spent that budget anyway, on the theory that a caller should be able to see where they were. later versions added fidonet, then zmodem transfers, and eventually internet mail and telnet, which is the sequence every surviving board software followed on its way out.

~ the postmortem ~

larosa started writing a web server in 1995 and called it spinnaker. that is the tell, and it is dated three years before the sale. the person who best understood what searchlight was for had already worked out that the interesting traffic was moving to a protocol where nobody dialed anybody.

in 1998 searchlight software sold both products to telegrafix communications, the company behind ripscrip, the graphics protocol that tried to give bbses pictures. two dial-up businesses merged in the year dial-up boards stopped being a business. the final searchlight release, version 5.1, is dated 6 february 1999.

~ the long tail ~

the support site at slbbs.com does not resolve. neither does telegrafix.com. searchlight.com resolves fine and lands on a domain broker's page offering to sell you the name, which is what happens to a short english word that used to belong to something.

larosa's own site is now a newsletter about something else entirely, with the trs-80 page still sitting under it like a plaque. the wikipedia article for searchlight carries one external link to a board in christchurch, new zealand, listed as reachable by telnet on port 2324, run by somebody who kept a dos machine alive for twenty years past the last patch.

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