The first BBS I had ever developed was in 1982 into 1983. It was based upon the source code my father had purchased for me to help further my learn of programming…

Dad bought: (Y)(B)(B)(S).
Which stood for Your Bulletin Board System. It was from a developer south of Tampa (where I lived at the time) and was sold as-is. YBBS was written in Basic.

As I became serious about learning programming and understanding how software controlled how my little computer worked, I became more curious of what was possible on my little Tandy Model-I computer.

Here I am, 37 years later releasing a product in full source (as-is) written in a language that I also wrote Modern Pascal. The tutorial pages for my compiler and script engine will explain why I wrote my own language… that is out of scope for this web site. Instead, we (me and my Alpha team) are here to explain how to Run Your Own BBS and potentially strike interest in you, so maybe you too will have interest in running a BBS and possibly learning programming since I include the source to the BBS package.

Legacy/X is the name we finally settled on for my BBS software. It operates 100% as a JIT (Just In Time Compiler) collection of Pascal scripts. My test site currently has over 200,000 messages online and everything works lightning fast. Legacy/X is capable of operating as a closed/private system, or a fully networked Fidonet node. I include the full source to the Fidonet Mailer, Fidonet Tosser, and even a NNTP Newsgroup Server that works with the BBS message areas. I offer all of this for free… again, to help spark the interest of up coming developers and with all of our new additions in functionality, people should enjoy calling (connecting) to Legacy/X systems around the world.

Legacy/X Software is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. It currently operates on systems around the world. You can easily install it to work on your home or work computers, along with the inexpensive Raspberry Pi.

• A Computer (Laptop, Desktop, or even a Raspberry Pi or Intel NUC)
• A little diskspace (less than 10mb total).
• A little RAM (works with 100mb, more if obviously better for performance).
• An operating system (Windows XP or newer, Linux 2.4 Kernel or newer, Mac OSX 10.4 or newer)

The era of a dedicated computer to run a BBS is gone. Today's operating systems can run multiple tasks. RYOBBS has a lite foot-print, so it co-exists well with other programs and it does not require a monitor so it can also run on an older computer sitting in the corner.