AGHBBS Internet Jobs

AGHBBS with RemoteAccess (commonly known as RA) was first developed in 1989 by Andrew Milner, and released in January 1990 as shareware. It was initially popular with QuickBBS sysops, as it started out as a clone of QuickBBS, and at the time QuickBBS had recently changed ownership and had an uncertain future. The main difference was that RA allowed multiple nodes to be used, by running under a multitasker such as Desqview, DoubleDOS, OS/2 or even Windows. This allowed supporting multiple phone lines/users at the same time. At the time, few non-commercial BBS packages allowed this. RA also had a cleaner sysop-interface, which was styled after the popular FrontDoor mailer with the permission of the FrontDoor author.

RemoteAccess quickly improved over several versions, and gained popularity in USA and its home country of Austrialia in the early years. By 1993 RemoteAccess was the most commonly used non-commercial BBS software in USA for FidoNet members. It did not gain immense popularity in Europe until 1995, when the European Underground BBS Scene jumped on the RA bandwagon in several countries including The Netherlands, Belgum, Germany, Sweden, and Denmark. From 1995 to 1997 the majority of the third-party utilities being developed for RA were provided by the European scene coders.

Andrew continued development of RA up untill mid 1996 when version 2.50 was released. The Word Wide Web had exploded in popularity just a year earlier, and many BBS Sysops were switching over from running a Bulletin Board to becoming an Internet Service Provider. Andrew was one of those Sysops, and it became clear that he had lost intrest during the end of the version 2.50 beta cycle. After the 2.50 release Andrew abandoned further development, and it was finally sold to Bruce Morse in USA at the end of 1997. By that time the BBS era was nearly dead, except for a small number of die-hard sysops who continue to run telnet based BBS's even today.