RemoteAccess

RemoteAccess is a MS-DOS Bulletin Board System (BBS) software package written by Andrew Milner and was published by his company Wantree Development in Australia. RemoteAccess was written in Turbo Pascal with some Assembly Language routines. RemoteAccess (commonly called RA) began in 1989 as a clone of QuickBBS by Adam Hudson. RemoteAccess was released under the shareware concept in 1990 and became popular in North America, Europe, UK, South Africa, and the South Pacific. Initially the main advantage over QuickBBS was its ability to run multiple nodes under Microsoft Windows, Quarterdeck's DESQview and OS/2. RA could also operate over a network or even a combination of network and multitasking operating systems to provide multiple "nodes per station" capabilities.

RA's features quickly grew to become considerably more advanced than the QuickBBS software it was cloned after. A number of other QuickBBS clones appeared shortly afterwards including ProBoard, SuperBBS and EzyCom, though they never gained as much support or notoriaty. RA was the first BBS software to support the popular JAM Message Base Format, which was partly conceived by RA's author, Andrew Milner. RA was also the first shareware BBS software to support a FDB (file database), rather than using files.bbs text files to describe files in each directory. RA interfaced with message relaying systems such as FidoNet through 3rd party utilities such as [http://www.defsol.se/ifd.html FrontDoor] and FastEcho, which were developed by members of the RA beta team.

With over 1500 titles, there were more third party utilities written for RA than for any other shareware BBS software. While RA was initially shareware, Andrew also released a commercial edition - "RemoteAccess Professional" - that was bundled with utilities to allow remote control of nodes over a network (RANETMGR, and RATSR).

Andrew Milner released his final version of RA (2.50) in May 1996. By that time, many System Operators switched over from running Bulletin Boards to becoming Internet Service Providers. Milner was one such System Operator, and after version 2.50 he stopped development. In April 1997 Milner put the rights and source code up [http://pcmicro.com/ra/forsale.html for sale] to the highest bidder, and it was sold in December 1997 to Bruce Morse in the USA. Morse released some minor updates including a Y2K fix, but did not add any new features to the code. Morse's final version (2.62) was released in August 2000. Bruce Morse continues to own the code today and RA is still available as shareware, as well as a commercial version known as RemoteAccess-Professional.

RemoteAccess was never ported to a 32-bit version, but there were two clones of RA in the later years which did include 32-bit versions: EleBBS in the late 1990s which included DOS, Windows, OS/2 and Linux flavors., and MBSE, a few years later, which focused mainly on the Linux operating system.

While RemoteAccess never included internal telnet support, it can be run as a telnet BBS by using a telnet-FOSSIL driver such as NetFoss, or a Virtual COM port engine such as [http://pcmicro.com/netserial NetSerial] under Windows, or using SIO/VMODEM under OS/2).

External links

* Wantree's 1996 [http://web.archive.org/web/19961117000625/wantree.com.au/remoteaccess.html Official RemoteAccess Homepage] Archived by the Internet Archive
*Bruce Morse's [http://www.rapro.com/ RA-Pro Site] - Download [http://www.rapro.com/ftp/ra_262sw.zip The final version 2.62.2] or view the [http://www.rapro.com/ftp/Ra_doc.zip Documentation]
* PC Micro's [http://pcmicro.com/ra/archives.html RemoteAccess Archives] (Former RA beta site, North American RemoteAccess support Site)
* PC Micro's [http://pcmicro.com/ra RemoteAccess Support Site] Includes links to many RA utilities
* Waldos's Place USA [http://www.wpusa.dynip.com/remoteaccess/ RemoteAccess Archives] (RA beta site, North American RemoteAccess Support Site)
* The BBS Documentary [http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/software/IBM/DOS/REMOTEACCESS/ RemoteAccess Archives]
* The official [http://dissent612.com/development/JAMAPI/JAM.DOC JAM Messagebase specifications]
* The [http://archives.thebbs.org/ BBS Archives] containing over 2000 RemoteAccess third party utilities.
* 16 [http://www.raforce.nl/pagegen.php?page=raf/raf RA Underground RAForce Group Releases] Archived by RAForce, NL.
* The [http://www.elebbs.com/ EleBBS Homepage] An almost exact 32-bit clone of RemoteAccess BBS.