What were you doing in September of 1986. I was in Tampa Florida working for Time Customer Service (a division of what is now Time-Warner). But for fun, I ran a Fidonet mail relay and BBS.
BBSes. What is a BBS you may ask. Well, you must be younger than 25-30 if you have to ask. BBSes were the forerunner to the internet. FidoNet was the infrastructure and backbone for email. I’ll spare you the long description and point you to the wiki.
Systems that I used were: Wildcat! 3.0, PCBoard, RBBS-PC, and FidoNet. I later stayed with Wildcat! Wildcat! was developed by Mustang Software, Inc. or MSI. Wildcat! is the reason that I bring all this up. Wildcat and MSI are 20 years old this month.
There wre many BBS systems back then. Just like there are many browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape), email hosts (Hotmail, MSN, Softhome, Yahoo!), websites (churchtechhead.com, thatdamblog.com, whitedove.org) and a myiad of email clients (Apple’s Mail.app, MS Outlook, Netscape, GMail) and email protocols (POP3, IMAP, LDAP).
But, how many of those original ground breaking developers or companies, for that matter, are still around. Besides the obvious like Microsoft and Apple. One comes to mind, and that is MSI. Well, MSI is gone, but Jim is still here. Here is the Wiki for a complete rundown of MSI.
Now, you can’t talk about a BBSes, Wildcat!, and success stories without mentioning Jim Harrier and Scott Hunter. Wildcat!’s demise was of course the internet. Wildcat! was sold to another company in 1998. The product lives on, however, as a specialty corporate communications system providing Internet, Intranet or Fidonet solutions for many companies.
People still use Fidonet?
Jim founded Mustang back in the 1986 and later sold it to Santronics in 1998. He later went on to merge with Quintus Corp which later became Avaya. Avaya is now one of the largest internet telephony companies around.
He revived 2 companies from the brink of bankruptcy. He was appointed COO of Starbase Corp. which was later sold to Borland. He also turned around Web Associates.
Today he and Scott founded and operate SpecialtyMatch Network which operate several online social networking services such as CoolIntros.com, EventMeeting.com and MyCountryMatch.com.
