PC Punternet

BBS: Bulletin Board System

This is the fan site, or Internet memory of the Commodore BBS scene in and
around my neighbourhood growing up in the 80s before anybody had heard the term
Internet. People used to connect modems to their phone lines and dial out
individual computers where only one person could connect at once. We'd read
messages, leave replies, and then try back the next day - or a few hours later
to see if the next visitor remarked.

BBS64
Although I used two BBS systems before this one, the first exciting BBS system I
was exposed to was the BBS64 system by Steve Punter... a Commodore celebrity of
the time. Steve wrote one of the very first Bulletin Board Systems of the time
in 1981 called the "PSI-Wordpro", named after the Word Processor he developed for the PET computers.

BBS64 came later, and ran on the Commodore 64 using mostly the same code and
appearance from the Commodore BBS system Steve sold for the PET computers before it. Although much of the American and world-wide market may not remember Steve and Punter Protocol as standards, in the Commodore world it was the leader by
far, and if you ask Steve, some of his ideas were the very first and best ways
to do things others simply stole.

AmexMods
I got started in the world by modding BBS64, which was reasonably easy because
the entire BBS structure was written in Commodore Basic. AmexMods were one of
three popular MOD packages owners could buy as ad-ons. A package of
customizations that (I felt) made the BBS so much nicer.

DIRCON BBS
The Dircon BBS system was written by long time friend of mine Jay Winick and
Aaron Ogus. Popular in Toronto, it was in use by at least 50+ boards at one
time. It's key features was that it ran on a c64 and 1541 disk drive at a time
when reining Commodore BBS king Steve Punter declared this was impossible.

It contained some copies of the Punter concepts because people already knew
them. In many ways it was a cheaper Punter clone for people (kids) who only had
the basic Commodore 64 equipment.

Since I had been selling AmexMods to BB64 owners, it was a logical step to move
into selling a whole program. I loved Dircon and knew the authors. I bought the
resale rights to Dircon for $1000 when it's authors moved on to new technologies
but could never get a working version that didn't require the elaborate copy
protection, so it faded away as the BBS market was moving to MS DOS.

PC-PunterNet (PCPN)
As the Commodore world was losing ground to IBM compatible PC machines quickly,
the BBS market was still strong. It was a logical step to port a version of the
BBS64 to the MS DOS world. Steve was commissioned to write what would become one of the first BBS networks where individual boards actually communicated with
other boards, opening up a whole new world of communication with other people
outside your own local calling area.

While I was a Commodore man all the way, I was unaware of how huge FIDONET and PCBoard and others were expanding. It was my intention to have PCPN sold as
retail in-store BBS product, opening up the world to a whole new market and
popularity, but programmer issues and marketing inexperience led the project to
fail around the time the Internet was starting and something called newsgroups
were catching on.

We did have a newsgroup-Punternet cross link written by PCPN Modder Scott
Maclean (who also wrote his own VIC 20 BBS a few years prior)... but it was to
late. FidoNet had thousands of nodes to PunterNet's 150+ and it was over.

Once people had the Internet, BBS systems started closing. It was no longer
worth the individual cost to run something few visited nightly.

I believe TPUG (Toronto Pet Users Group) ran the last working version of PC-PunterNet.

There is a Facebook page of members who find us online to reminisce.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2325888910