Wildcat! BBS

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

~ the goodbye ~

wildcat! bbs was the best-selling commercial bulletin board system package for ms-dos. mustang software, based in bakersfield california, released the first version in 1986. for the next decade it was a default answer to "i want to run a bbs and bill people for time on it." the windows port came later. the customer was a sysop running a paid dial-up board out of a spare room with a usrobotics modem in the closet.

the product was a complete server. it handled logins and file libraries. door games and per-minute billing came with it. mustang sold tiered licenses by line count. a small two-line board cost a few hundred dollars. a thirty-two-line board cost real money. the math worked as long as sysops could charge their users.

by 1996 the math stopped working. america online was a flat-rate dial-up that did everything a sysop sold, only cheaper. the open web did the rest. mustang software pivoted and shipped wildcat! interactive net server, winserver for short, which added smtp and http access on top of the existing bbs engine. it kept the user base for a few more years but the new customer pipeline never came back.

the first time i heard the name wildcat! was in a tucows download index in 1999. by then the dos-era package had already been sold to santronics for a year, and the active dial-up bulletin board scene that justified it was collapsing into the open web. i was on a turkish ttnet account in ankara reading web forums, not dialing into a paid local board.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the sale ~

on november 19, 1998 mustang software sold the wildcat! product line to santronics software inc. santronics had been writing third-party tools for wildcat! since 1991, which made the handoff smooth. mustang itself was acquired by quintus in 2000 and rolled into call center software. the bbs line went into archive maintenance under santronics, with occasional updates for paying sysops who refused to migrate off it.

~ what remains ~

the dial-up bbs as a business died between 1995 and 2000. wildcat! was the gentlest version of that death, because mustang found a buyer willing to keep the lights on for the diehards. compare it to fidonet's slower bleed, or to the small bbs packages that simply stopped shipping in 1996. wildcat! got a buyer willing to maintain it for the diehards on a long decreasing curve. that is a luxurious end for a piece of 1986 dos shareware.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »