RoboBOARD/FX was a computer software first introduced by Hamilton TeleGraphics Inc, written by the owner Seth Hamilton in 1992.
At a time where BBS Software (such as RemoteAccess) were merely using ANSI art interfaces RoboBOARD started a revolution. It was the first fully graphical BBS system with iconic navigation, punchy bitmaps, and vector fonts, all at a time when ultra-fast high-speed modems were barely clocking 2400 bit/s.
A bulletin board system or BBS is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging messages with other users through public message boards and sometimes via direct chatting. In the middle to late 1980s, message aggregators and bulk store-and-forward'ers sprung up to provide services such as FidoNet, which is similar to email.
RemoteAccess is a DOS Bulletin Board System (BBS) software package written by Andrew Milner and published by his company Wantree Development in Australia. RemoteAccess was written in Turbo Pascal with some Assembly Language routines. RemoteAccess 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.
ANSI art is a computer art form that was widely used at one time on BBSes. It is similar to ASCII art, but constructed from a larger set of 256 letters, numbers, and symbols — all codes found in IBM code page 437, often referred to as extended ASCII and used in MS-DOS and Unix environments. ANSI art also contains special ANSI escape sequences that color text with the 16 foreground and 8 background colours offered by ANSI.SYS, an MS-DOS device driver loosely based upon the ANSI X3.64 standard for text terminals. Some ANSI artists take advantage of the cursor control sequences within ANSI X3.64 in order to create animations, commonly referred to as ANSImations. ANSI art and text files which incorporate ANSI codes carry the de facto .ANS file extension.
RoboBOARD/FX provided a familiar looking graphical user interface for DOS, complete with dragging windows, clicking buttons, scrollbars, pop up dialogue boxes and templates. In this GUI environment RoboBOARD/FX supported graphics modes of up to 1024 x 768 in 16/256 SVGA color.
DOS is a family of disk operating systems, hence the name. DOS primarily consists of MS-DOS and a rebranded version under the name IBM PC DOS, both of which were introduced in 1981. Other later compatible systems from other manufacturers include DR-DOS (1988), ROM-DOS (1989), PTS-DOS (1993), and FreeDOS (1998). MS-DOS dominated the x86-based IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995.
One of the biggest improvements RoboBOARD/FX brought into the BBS world was it built-in photographic capabilities, which allowed a BBS to display images to its users in real-time, without requiring a pre-download.
The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web and other information on the Internet. It was launched in 2001 by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California, United States.
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