On Wed, 17 May 2017, william degnan via cctalk wrote:

There may have been Rainbow BBS programs, but I doubt anything for the
11/34.  You may have to write this.

That reminds me of a bit of obscure trivia...

Back in the early days of FidoNet, one or more of the Fido BBS sysops had DEC Rainbows. The machines could run Fido just fine, but the serial port address/port didn't follow the convention laid down by the IBM PC. At the time, there were other MS-DOS compatibles that also had a similar issue with the serial port and some of those folks wanted to run Fido.

Tom Jennings, Wynn Waggoner III(sp?) and Thom Henderson(sp?) got together to create the FOSSIL standard.

FOSSIL is Fido Opus Seadog Serial Interface Layer and provided a mechanism via INT 14 for any MS-DOS compatible computer to run any BBS or mailer software that had FOSSIL support and a FOSSIL driver available for it.

FOSSIL continued to be a thing long after the issue of serial port incompatibility was a thing of the past. In fact there's modern software out there now such as NetFossil that telnet-enables software that can talk to a FOSSIL driver.

The two popular FOSSIL drivers that I recall from back in the day were BNU and Ray Gwinn's X00.

As an aside, if anyone has or knows where I can find the source code for Opus BBS, I'd be interested in hearing from you!

g.

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