Hey all,

I've been doing some research into what I'd call the "overlooked" side of BBS aesthetics -- the corporate and vendor support boards that companies ran in the late 80s and early 90s. Think Creative Labs, Novell, US Robotics, Hayes, Compaq, Dell, Microsoft, and similar operations. The boards where you'd dial in to grab a Sound Blaster driver or post a question about your NetWare configuration.

What I'm trying to track down is whether anyone has preserved screenshots or captures of what those menus actually looked like. Most of them were running TBBS, Wildcat! or PCBoard, and my assumption is that they used fairly minimal ANSI -- colored text menus, maybe a simple company name header, but nothing like the art scene boards? Functional and to the point?

I think that, these boards were treated as disposable infrastructure. Once the company moved to FTP sites and then the web, nobody thought to capture what those interfaces looked like before pulling the plug. The hobby boards, the art scene, the warez boards; those all had communities that cared about preserving that culture. But the vendor support boards it seems that it kind of slipped under the carpet, even though they were very much part of the BBS world. Millions of people dialed into them.

I've gone through the usual sources: the BBS Documentary materials, Boardwatch Magazine archives on the Internet Archive, the Wikimedia Commons BBS screenshots category, but actual captures of vendor board menus seem to be extremely scarce.

So I'm curious: does anyone here remember what these boards looked like firsthand? Even better, did anyone ever think to take a screen capture or print a screen before hanging up? I'd love to see what the actual menu structure and visual presentation was on a typical vendor support board circa 1992-1994. It's a corner of BBS history that I think deserves a little more documentation, and honestly, there's something about that clean design philosophy that I find worth studying.

Thanks for any leads.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2024/05/29 (Linux/64)
* Origin: The Montreal Greek Times

Greek Times wrote to All <=-

So I'm curious: does anyone here remember what these boards looked like firsthand? Even better, did anyone ever think to take a screen capture
or print a screen before hanging up?

Picture an ASCII representation of the company logo, lots of
boilerplate, and ASCII menus reminiscent of PCBoard. That's what
I recall from calling AST, PC Magazine's BBS, 3com and some others in
the 1990s.

I inherited an AST AboveBoard, one of those interesting memory board
plus serial/parallel. It had a socketed serial chip, so I could get one
of those 16550s and run the BBS off of it.

The board had 3 separate DIP switch fields, if memory serves, and no
silk-screened indications on the board. I was able to download the
manual as a txt file and thought that was pretty cool.

Around that time, I was setting up an interactive voice response
faxback system for my company, they weren't convinced that enough
people had modems at the time for a BBS!


--- MultiMail/Win v0.52
þ Synchronet þ .: realitycheckbbs.org :: scientia potentia est :.

Re: Looking for screenshots/a
By: Greek Times to All on Sun Feb 22 2026 11:00 am

So I'm curious: does anyone here remember what these boards looked like firsthand? Even better, did anyone ever think to take a screen capture or print a screen before hanging up? I'd love to see what the actual menu structure and visual presentation was on a typical vendor support board circa 1992-1994. It's a corner of BBS history that I think deserves a little more documentation, and honestly, there's something about that clean design philosophy that I find worth studying.

Thanks for any leads.

You might try looking through some of the old shareware CD's, Some of those CD's hold a lot of historical BBS gold.

Try http://cd.textfiles.com/sv/

I have spent some time going through some of these and found a couple of my old programs and of a few BBS Lists I used to make and upload to other BBS's.

Denn

...Unable to locate Coffee -- Operator Halted!

---
þ Synchronet þ the Outwest BBS - outwest.synchro.net - Home of BBSBASE 6.0

Re: Looking for screenshots/a
By: Greek Times to All on Sun Feb 22 2026 11:00 am

I've been doing some research into what I'd call the "overlooked" side of BBS aesthetics -- the corporate and vendor support boards that companies ran in the late 80s and early 90s. Think Creative Labs, Novell, US Robotics, Hayes, Compaq, Dell, Microsoft, and similar operations. The boards where you'd dial in to grab a Sound Blaster driver or post a question about your NetWare configuration.

What I'm trying to track down is whether anyone has preserved screenshots or captures of what those menus actually looked like. Most of them were running TBBS, Wildcat! or PCBoard, and my assumption is that they used fairly minimal ANSI -- colored text menus, maybe a simple company name header, but nothing like the art scene boards? Functional and to the point?

I didn't get any screen captures of corporate BBSes; I only remember ever calling one corporate BBS, and it was in a different state, so there were long-distance phone charges involved. I remember it was like your assumption, it didn't look fancy, but I believe I got what I needed from their BBS (either an updated version of a driver/program or some information).

Nightfox

---
þ Synchronet þ Digital Distortion: digitaldistortionbbs.com

Re: Looking for screenshots/a
By: Greek Times to All on Sun Feb 22 2026 11:00 am

Hey all,

I've been doing some research into what I'd call the "overlooked"
side of BBS aesthetics -- the corporate and vendor support boards
that companies ran in the late 80s and early 90s. Think Creative
Labs, Novell, US Robotics, Hayes, Compaq, Dell, Microsoft,
and similar operations. The boards where you'd dial in to grab a
Sound Blaster driver or post a question about your NetWare
configuration.

What I'm trying to track down is whether anyone has preserved
screenshots or captures of what those menus actually looked like.
Most of them were running TBBS, Wildcat! or PCBoard, and my
assumption is that they used fairly minimal ANSI -- colored text
menus, maybe a simple company name header, but nothing like the art
scene boards? Functional and to the point?

I think that, these boards were treated as disposable infrastructure.
Once the company moved to FTP sites and then the web, nobody thought
to capture what those interfaces looked like before pulling the
plug. The hobby boards, the art scene, the warez boards; those all
had communities that cared about preserving that culture. But the
vendor support boards it seems that it kind of slipped under the

There's nothing special about it. they were boring stock bbses.
you could download a few things. i called every one i could find.
there wasn't any support on the msg bases. these places want you to call in voice for support. if you emailed the sysop they didn't reply.


it's not overlooked. there's nothing to look at.


--
"Before using Wildcat....This Company did not have a convenient way of
looking after some of the richest clients in the world...Now we do!"
---
þ Synchronet þ ::: BBSES.info - free BBS services :::

Re: Looking for screenshots/a
By: Greek Times to All on Sun Feb 22 2026 11:00 am

So I'm curious: does anyone here remember what these boards looked like firsthand? Even better, did anyone ever think to take a screen capture or pr a screen before hanging up? I'd love to see what the actual menu structure a

Others may have responded about this already. I wasn't on many of these, but the few that I did dial into were always completely stock. Companies, as far as I saw, didn't customize their BBSes at all. If they did, it was to disable features. They might've set a color different sometimes, if there was that option ;). Log in to a stock Wildcat! install, and that's what it looked like.

---
þ Synchronet þ TIRED of waiting 2 hours for a taco? GO TO TACOPRONTO.bbs.io

Re: Looking for screenshots/a
By: phigan to Greek Times on Wed Feb 25 2026 07:41 am

So I'm curious: does anyone here remember what these boards looked like
firsthand? Even better, did anyone ever think to take a screen capture or
pr a screen before hanging up? I'd love to see what the actual menu
structure a

Others may have responded about this already. I wasn't on many of these, but the few that I did dial into were always completely stock. Companies, as far as I saw, didn't customize their BBSes at all. If they did, it was to disable features. They might've set a color different sometimes, if there was that option ;). Log in to a stock Wildcat! install, and that's what it looked like.

Every "corporate" BBS I ever logged into was just stock WildCat or MajorBBS. Later, they became stock Worldgroup.

I want to say one I called ran Excalibur, but I don't think that one was around for very long.

I can't remember what companies ran what, though.

...All great discoveries are made by mistake.

---
þ Synchronet þ War Ensemble BBS - The sport is war, total war - warensemble.com

Re: Looking for screenshots/a
By: DaiTengu to phigan on Wed Feb 25 2026 10:35 am

Every "corporate" BBS I ever logged into was just stock WildCat or MajorBBS. Later, they became stock Worldgroup.

From what I remember, MajorBBS had some products & software features to enable easily having a bunch of phone lines for a dialup BBS. I had used some MajorBBS boards in my area in the early 90s that had a bunch of phone lines, with active multi-node chat rooms. I remember seeing some hardware they offered that allowed a lot more serial ports than were usually offered on a PC.. From what I remember, a typical IBM-compatible PC had bulit-in support for up to 4 serial ports (and a couple of them shared IRQs, from what I remember, so if you wanted to use all 4 simulteneously, you had to re-configure their IRQs). But I recall seeing that the company that made MajorBBS offered some hardware that allowed a lot more serial ports, and their MajorBBS software naturally supported that. I'm not sure how the hardware accomplished that, since typically there were limited IRQs available.

Nightfox

---
þ Synchronet þ Digital Distortion: digitaldistortionbbs.com

DaiTengu wrote to phigan <=-

So I'm curious: does anyone here remember what these boards looked like
firsthand? Even better, did anyone ever think to take a screen capture or
pr a screen before hanging up? I'd love to see what the actual menu
structure a

Others may have responded about this already. I wasn't on many of these, but the few that I did dial into were always completely stock. Companies, as far as I saw, didn't customize their BBSes at all. If they did, it was to disable features. They might've set a color different sometimes, if there was that option ;). Log in to a stock Wildcat! install, and that's what it looked like.

Every "corporate" BBS I ever logged into was just stock WildCat or MajorBBS. Later, they became stock Worldgroup.

I want to say one I called ran Excalibur, but I don't think that one
was around for very long.

I can't remember what companies ran what, though.

I recall that the US Robotics (modems) BBS ran PCBoard. ;-)




... Gone crazy, be back later, please leave message.
--- MultiMail/Linux v0.52
þ Synchronet þ Palantir BBS * palantirbbs.ddns.net * Pensacola, FL

Nightfox wrote to DaiTengu <=-

From what I remember, MajorBBS had some products & software features to enable easily having a bunch of phone lines for a dialup BBS. I had
used some MajorBBS boards in my area in the early 90s that had a bunch
of phone lines, with active multi-node chat rooms. I remember seeing
some hardware they offered that allowed a lot more serial ports than
were usually offered on a PC.. From what I remember, a typical IBM-compatible PC had bulit-in support for up to 4 serial ports (and a couple of them shared IRQs, from what I remember, so if you wanted to
use all 4 simulteneously, you had to re-configure their IRQs). But I recall seeing that the company that made MajorBBS offered some hardware that allowed a lot more serial ports, and their MajorBBS software naturally supported that. I'm not sure how the hardware accomplished that, since typically there were limited IRQs available.

Digiboards! They rocked. I had a 16 port digiboard running a dial-up
WAN back in those days - I was working for a large retailer with 100
stores. The POS system in the stores was essentially a DOS box, and
when they shut down at night, it ran a batch file we wrote to zip up
sales, credit card data and inventory data, then send it to the hub.
The hub system was an OS/2 box running a package called Excellenet,
using a 16 port digiboard.

There was a special driver, might have used int14h, a protocol used to
share modems over the LAN. The digiboard had 386 processors on it,
it did most of the processing on-board. We had 16 modems on it, and
when the east coast stores would close, they'd all be busy.

The whole system reminded me of FTN, I thought you could reproduce most
of it with FrontDoor and some batch files.



--- MultiMail/Win v0.52
þ Synchronet þ .: realitycheckbbs.org :: scientia potentia est :.

Re: Re: Looking for screenshots/a
By: poindexter FORTRAN to Nightfox on Thu Feb 26 2026 07:39 am

Digiboards! They rocked. I had a 16 port digiboard running a dial-up WAN back in those days - I was working for a large retailer with 100 stores. The POS system in the stores was essentially a DOS box, and when they shut down at night, it ran a batch file we wrote to zip up sales, credit card data and inventory data, then send it to the hub. The hub system was an OS/2 box running a package called Excellenet, using a 16 port digiboard.

There was a special driver, might have used int14h, a protocol used to share modems over the LAN. The digiboard had 386 processors on it, it did most of the processing on-board. We had 16 modems on it, and when the east coast stores would close, they'd all be busy.

It sounds like those Digiboards were pretty serious units. I think it would have been fun to run a multi-line BBS using one of those, but I didn't have the money at the time.

Nightfox

---
þ Synchronet þ Digital Distortion: digitaldistortionbbs.com

Re: Re: Looking for screenshots/a
By: Gamgee to DaiTengu on Wed Feb 25 2026 03:04 pm

I can't remember what companies ran what, though.

I recall that the US Robotics (modems) BBS ran PCBoard. ;-)

The one I never called, because I couldn't afford a USR modem :)

But, finally, after 30-some years, I have a USR modem! Who's laughing now, US-Robotics?

(It's them, they sold to 3com in 1997 for $6.6 billion, the second largest tech merger ever at the time. That's $13.5 billion in today's money)

...He who laughs last probably didn't get the joke.

---
þ Synchronet þ War Ensemble BBS - The sport is war, total war - warensemble.com