Hey all,

I've been doing some research into what I'd call the "overlooked" side of BBS aesthetics -- the corporate and vendor support boards that companies ran in the late 80s and early 90s. Think Creative Labs, Novell, US Robotics, Hayes, Compaq, Dell, Microsoft, and similar operations. The boards where you'd dial in to grab a Sound Blaster driver or post a question about your NetWare configuration.

What I'm trying to track down is whether anyone has preserved screenshots or captures of what those menus actually looked like. Most of them were running TBBS, Wildcat! or PCBoard, and my assumption is that they used fairly minimal ANSI -- colored text menus, maybe a simple company name header, but nothing like the art scene boards? Functional and to the point?

I think that, these boards were treated as disposable infrastructure. Once the company moved to FTP sites and then the web, nobody thought to capture what those interfaces looked like before pulling the plug. The hobby boards, the art scene, the warez boards; those all had communities that cared about preserving that culture. But the vendor support boards it seems that it kind of slipped under the carpet, even though they were very much part of the BBS world. Millions of people dialed into them.

I've gone through the usual sources: the BBS Documentary materials, Boardwatch Magazine archives on the Internet Archive, the Wikimedia Commons BBS screenshots category, but actual captures of vendor board menus seem to be extremely scarce.

So I'm curious: does anyone here remember what these boards looked like firsthand? Even better, did anyone ever think to take a screen capture or print a screen before hanging up? I'd love to see what the actual menu structure and visual presentation was on a typical vendor support board circa 1992-1994. It's a corner of BBS history that I think deserves a little more documentation, and honestly, there's something about that clean design philosophy that I find worth studying.

Thanks for any leads.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2024/05/29 (Linux/64)
* Origin: The Montreal Greek Times

Greek Times wrote to All <=-

So I'm curious: does anyone here remember what these boards looked like firsthand? Even better, did anyone ever think to take a screen capture
or print a screen before hanging up?

Picture an ASCII representation of the company logo, lots of
boilerplate, and ASCII menus reminiscent of PCBoard. That's what
I recall from calling AST, PC Magazine's BBS, 3com and some others in
the 1990s.

I inherited an AST AboveBoard, one of those interesting memory board
plus serial/parallel. It had a socketed serial chip, so I could get one
of those 16550s and run the BBS off of it.

The board had 3 separate DIP switch fields, if memory serves, and no
silk-screened indications on the board. I was able to download the
manual as a txt file and thought that was pretty cool.

Around that time, I was setting up an interactive voice response
faxback system for my company, they weren't convinced that enough
people had modems at the time for a BBS!


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■ Synchronet ■ .: realitycheckbbs.org :: scientia potentia est :.

Re: Looking for screenshots/a
By: Greek Times to All on Sun Feb 22 2026 11:00 am

So I'm curious: does anyone here remember what these boards looked like firsthand? Even better, did anyone ever think to take a screen capture or print a screen before hanging up? I'd love to see what the actual menu structure and visual presentation was on a typical vendor support board circa 1992-1994. It's a corner of BBS history that I think deserves a little more documentation, and honestly, there's something about that clean design philosophy that I find worth studying.

Thanks for any leads.

You might try looking through some of the old shareware CD's, Some of those CD's hold a lot of historical BBS gold.

Try http://cd.textfiles.com/sv/

I have spent some time going through some of these and found a couple of my old programs and of a few BBS Lists I used to make and upload to other BBS's.

Denn

...Unable to locate Coffee -- Operator Halted!

---
■ Synchronet ■ the Outwest BBS - outwest.synchro.net - Home of BBSBASE 6.0

Re: Looking for screenshots/a
By: Greek Times to All on Sun Feb 22 2026 11:00 am

I've been doing some research into what I'd call the "overlooked" side of BBS aesthetics -- the corporate and vendor support boards that companies ran in the late 80s and early 90s. Think Creative Labs, Novell, US Robotics, Hayes, Compaq, Dell, Microsoft, and similar operations. The boards where you'd dial in to grab a Sound Blaster driver or post a question about your NetWare configuration.

What I'm trying to track down is whether anyone has preserved screenshots or captures of what those menus actually looked like. Most of them were running TBBS, Wildcat! or PCBoard, and my assumption is that they used fairly minimal ANSI -- colored text menus, maybe a simple company name header, but nothing like the art scene boards? Functional and to the point?

I didn't get any screen captures of corporate BBSes; I only remember ever calling one corporate BBS, and it was in a different state, so there were long-distance phone charges involved. I remember it was like your assumption, it didn't look fancy, but I believe I got what I needed from their BBS (either an updated version of a driver/program or some information).

Nightfox

Re: Looking for screenshots/a
By: Greek Times to All on Sun Feb 22 2026 11:00 am

Hey all,

I've been doing some research into what I'd call the "overlooked"
side of BBS aesthetics -- the corporate and vendor support boards
that companies ran in the late 80s and early 90s. Think Creative
Labs, Novell, US Robotics, Hayes, Compaq, Dell, Microsoft,
and similar operations. The boards where you'd dial in to grab a
Sound Blaster driver or post a question about your NetWare
configuration.

What I'm trying to track down is whether anyone has preserved
screenshots or captures of what those menus actually looked like.
Most of them were running TBBS, Wildcat! or PCBoard, and my
assumption is that they used fairly minimal ANSI -- colored text
menus, maybe a simple company name header, but nothing like the art
scene boards? Functional and to the point?

I think that, these boards were treated as disposable infrastructure.
Once the company moved to FTP sites and then the web, nobody thought
to capture what those interfaces looked like before pulling the
plug. The hobby boards, the art scene, the warez boards; those all
had communities that cared about preserving that culture. But the
vendor support boards it seems that it kind of slipped under the

There's nothing special about it. they were boring stock bbses.
you could download a few things. i called every one i could find.
there wasn't any support on the msg bases. these places want you to call in voice for support. if you emailed the sysop they didn't reply.


it's not overlooked. there's nothing to look at.


--
"Before using Wildcat....This Company did not have a convenient way of
looking after some of the richest clients in the world...Now we do!"
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