Trek BBS was written by Richard Dale Ruffer (Captian Picard) and Michael Paul Meredith (Sebastian Shaw) in Saint Louis Missouri in 1987. It was based on the WWIV Turbo Pascal source code and modified to work in Turbo Pascal 4.0 with many new features added.
Features[]
Trek BBS added better support for external doors/games and used several different drop file formats. It had a better chat program for split-screen chat using ANSI between a SYSOP or someone at the keyboard and the user. It added a credit system where users could buy credits for a better upload credit, game/door credit, posting message credit to meet the ratio system most SYSOPS used. The message board was improved with system macros to display system information in messages as well as the current user information. The code was tweaked to run faster and use less memory.
The Downfall[]
The code was given away with regitrations for SYSOPS to modify their own BBS, along with a subscription for updated source code. There was a pirate who stole the Trek BBS code and was selling it, someone named The Recker on a Florida BBS was selling pirated versions and claiming it as his own. This lead to the demise of Trek BBS as it denied income to the two main programmers. Eventually Trek BBS gave way to WWIV rewritten in Turbo C, because it was a better product and had basically the same features as Trek BBS had.
The Aftermash[]
The main BBS for Trek BBS was "The Enterprise" by Captain Picard (Ruffner) and the second BBS was "The Hellfire Club" by Sebastian Shawn (Meredith). After the WWIV switch they merged their BBSes with "Ebony Eye's Escape" and Ebony Eyes to make "Third Stage BBS" which ran WWIV and used WWIVNet and due to politics and BBS wars left WWIVnet to form WWIVlink.