Canada Remote Systems

Canada Remote Systems, or simply CRS, was a major commercial bulletin board system located in the Toronto area. It was one of the earliest commercial systems outside the "big iron" companies such as CompuServe or The Source, and survived into the 1990s before being overwhelmed by the Internet and closing down.

CRS was founded by Jud Newell in 1979 as Mississauga RCP/M, a small one-line system running on RCP/M that later became Toronto RCP/M after a move. It became CRS when Newell decided to make the growing system a full-time job in 1985, moving to the then top-of-the-line PCBoard system and moving to DOS from CP/M. It grew over the next few years to become one of the first really large BBS systems, which allowed its users to carry on conversations with thousands of local residents. At the time the average BBS system was run on a single 300 or 1200 baud modem and had extremely limited storage space for messages or files (hard drives were not yet common). At the other end of the scale, larger online services offered thousands of files and messages, but at a fairly high per-hour cost. CRS offered a practical "middle ground" between the expensive mainframe systems and the local BBS, both in terms of pricing and features.

During the late 1980s the growth of the FidoNet upset this balance somewhat. Now a user could call into their local free BBS system and have conversations with users from all over the world—although practically this was limited to North America. PCBoard did support a Fido-like system known as RelayNet (or RIME), but this was supported by PCBoard only and thus had a much smaller amount of traffic than the platform independent Fido. For some time CRS offered RelayNet hub service known as NAnet to other PCBoard operators throughout North America in order to increase the user base, going so far as to offer a 1-800 number for these BBSes to call in on.

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