SuperBBS

~ the obituary ~

My first modem was in 1998 and I dialed an ISP with it, not a board. By then this package had been abandoned for five years and the whole category it belonged to was being quietly replaced by a web browser. So the honest position here is that I am reading a shareware archive, not remembering anything.

SuperBBS was DOS software for running a bulletin board, written by Aki Antman and Risto Virkkala in Finland and released in 1990. A sysop installed it on a PC with a modem attached, and callers dialed in one at a time for messages and files, plus a chat with whoever else was awake on the far end. The Finnish trade paper Tivi, writing in March 2018 about Virkkala's later career, says he started writing software in 1990 when he coded SuperBBS during the winter ski holiday.

It went out as shareware, which in that period meant the author posted it to file archives and boards passed it along, with payment asked of anyone who kept using it. English Wikipedia claims it was running in more than forty countries, with no source attached and a citation flag sitting on the sentence since 2012. A hidden editor's note beside it in the article source credits the figure to Antman.

~ the case file ~

~ a clone of a clone ~

The lineage is explicit in every description of it. Adam Hudson wrote QuickBBS and Andrew Milner cloned it in Australia as RemoteAccess; SuperBBS then cloned RemoteAccess and went off in its own direction from there. All three shared enough structure that doorway programs written for one would run under the others, which is why a sysop could switch packages without losing the games and utilities bolted onto their board.

That compatibility was the whole market. The message base format was Hudson and the user file was USERS.BBS, so anything written against those formats worked everywhere. Nobody in this part of the industry was trying to lock a customer in, mostly because there was no customer in the commercial sense, just people running a phone line out of a spare room.

~ the last build ~

Version 1.17-3 is dated 13 February 1993 and nothing came after it. Antman went into the Finnish army that year and decided not to pick the work back up, and Wikipedia's infobox fills the discontinued field with two words instead of a date: "very much". Compulsory military service ended a package that boards in dozens of countries were running, and the entry reads as a joke because there is no formal field for that.

This matters for a grave because most abandoned shareware has no ending at all, just a last release date and silence afterward, and silence dates nothing. Here the reason is written down by the people involved. The code stopped because its author had somewhere else to be for a year, and by the time that year was over the boards were already losing their callers to dial-up internet accounts.

~ afterward ~

Virkkala went on to found Eficode, a Finnish software company that is still trading today, and Tivi's 2018 piece treats the BBS as the origin story rather than the achievement. The domain superbbs.com belongs to somebody else entirely. It resolves to a GoDaddy sales lander, and the small print at the foot of it tells visitors the page is unaffiliated with any entity of that name and that they have arrived in error.

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