Stelex BBS Toronto, Canada.
On-line since 1984Home E-mail Forum Bulletins Audio Store
About The System, cont'd.
The original Stelex BBS used code written by Steve Punter.
As "TNSS", Stelex
became part of Steve's network of bulletin boards running the "BBS64"
software on the public telephone system.†
The driving force behind this was the lack of information about the imminent demise of traditional photography, and the rise of what would come
to be known as desktop publishing,** and about digital imaging in general. In the 1980's this was still uncharted territory.
Bulletin boards reached their peak in popularity around 1990 to 1994.
After the launch of Windows 95 and the rise of AOL (which ironically
began as a pricey service where 8-bit Commodore machines functioned as
the terminal/client), IBM-PC and Apple Macintosh users drifted to the internet and the
World-Wide Web (Wikipedia link).
By the late 1990's most of the original bulletin boards and the software and platforms
they had run on had vanished, and the CompuServe Information Service was a shadow
of its former self; this late 2017 item in Fast Company suggests that
CIS "was never the same" after AOL took over.
Most of the original Stelex files are not on-line. Nevertheless, we are attempting
to transfer some of the main ideas and concepts to the web, and it would be
nice to be able to make some things available via Telnet or perhaps via
the Wildcat server from Santronics.
Beginning in the spring of 2019 the "forums" here were phpBB... comments and suggestions are welcome.
† Steve Punter's software was covered in the Online Guide to the Commodore Computers by Mike Cane (Signet/The New American Library) circa 1984.
**An excellent overview of the software industry appears in the
book Almost
Perfect, Pete Peterson's history of WordPerfect.
Another "look back in time" to the early days of BBS'sing
appeared in The Atlantic in late 2016.
For article ideas, advertising inquiries, complaints and to send vituperative messages etc., e-mail "TNSSBBS" at Hotmail dot com.