WWIV
| Developer(s) | Wayne Bell |
|---|---|
| Initial release | 1984 |
| Written in | BASIC, Pascal, C, C++ |
| Type | bulletin board system |
WWIV was a popular brand of bulletin board system software from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. The modifiable source code allowed a sysop to customize the main BBS program for their particular needs and aesthetics. WWIV also allowed tens of thousands of BBSes to link together, forming a worldwide proprietary computer network, the WWIVnet, similar to FidoNet, but with fewer problems related to forum management.
WWIV started out in early 1984 as a single BBS in Los Angeles, California, run by Wayne Bell, who wrote the original 1.0 version in BASIC as a high school programing project, and shared the software with 25 of his friends.
As the popularity of WWIV spread in the mid-1980s, for practical reasons Bell switched to Pascal — specifically Borland's Turbo Pascal 2.0 — creating a compiled version of the BBS but distributing the source code for it to anyone who was interested in their own BBS. This encouraged sysops to develop new features for WWIV, and these ideas were released as "mods" that others could add to their own copies.
Shortly after releasing the 2.0 version, Borland updated the compiler to the 3.0 and 3.1 versions; WWIV's versions were revised to reflect the compiler versions. One of Turbo Pascal's strong features was the ability to easily "chain" sub-programs and external modules into memory only as required; as the average available RAM for a program to load and run in MS-DOS was 384 kilobytes, this became a very important feature. "Chaining" allowed for online games and other utilities to be used with WWIV without having to add the new source code for the game and then recompiling the entire BBS again. These programs — referred to as "chains" or "doors" — became very popular.
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