I’m a child of the BBS generation. Well, to be fair to all the grey beards out there, I’m a child of the late BBS generation (1993-1998). I have many, many fond memories of my favorite door games, FidoNet threads and meet-ups.

I frequented a local BBS here in San Diego, California called Dream Net. Dream Net ran a multi-line BBS software called MajorBBS and was sysoped by Blondie (Tara) and Reep (George). What made Dream Net so great is that being multi-lined allowed it to host some of the first great MUD’s such as MajorMUD and my personal favorite, Tele-Arena. Other great multi-user games included TradeWars 2002, Farwest Trivia and T-LORD (Tournament LORD, which was a version of Legend of the Red Dragon for MajorBBS).

Now over fifteen years later, BBS’s are all but dead. Those of us who used them try and contact old friends using sites like BBSMates.com. People have put out documentarties and books on the BBS culture and lamenting of those days when carrier signals screamed from little boxes. I believe as a whole the remaining BBS community is very co-operative in trying to preserve their past and makes sure the software, which easily qualifies as abandonware, doesn’t fall victim to the cyber ether to be lost forever on a floppy disk in a closet somewhere. A great example of this effort is The MajorBBS Restoration Project.

The MajorBS Restoration Project is a group of people ranging from hardcore software developers to enthusiasts looking to preserve and restore everything relating to the MajorBBS bulletin board software and related software. One thing people are running into is the legality and morality of using ‘pirated’ copies of software that is no longer for sale or the parent companies no longer exist. I have found myself in the same situation and began to dabble in MajorBBS reverse engineering in order to make the modules I wished to use for my own private purposes, functional.

For the most part, previous license holders for MajorBBS software have come forward and donated their source code, which represents thousands of hours in hard work and labor, to the community for preservation and continued development by enthusiasts. An example of this would be M.B. Murdock & Associates and their MajorBBS game Galactic Empire. As a company, they closed their doors in 1996 due to the decline in BBS sales, but in 2002 Mike Murdock released the source code for the Galactic Empires MajorBBS module under the GPL license.

There have been a few software vendors who have been known to protect the MajorBBS modules they’ve developed either as a corporation, or as an individual developer who ran his own business during this period. Part of me, as a software developer myself, can understand that you might not want to just give out the source code to something you’ve worked so hard on. Lord knows I don’t go around handing out my own But some of these people actually go as far to being legal action against individuals who are running ‘pirated’ copies of their software, fifteen years after it was released.

I’m not saying that it justifies piracy, but I think legally if I can prove:

• The software is over a certain age (perhaps ten+ years)
• The originating company no longer exists, or
• The company does exist but will no longer sell copies of the software

Then, aren’t they just using their old software as bait to perhaps lure users into a lawsuit for pirating software that was impossible to purchase by legal means.

What I would love to see is a movement to simply preserve the past. My past. Millions of people’s pasts. Let’s try to come together using projects like the MajorBBS Restoration Project or others of it’s type, and get those programs we all love and remember back in the open before they’re lost forever! Even a simple keygen that would take a software author a few hours to package and release could help many, many people.