Blue Board is a BBS software system created by Martin Sikes (1968-2007) for the Commodore 64 in the 1980s in Vancouver, Canada, and sold worldwide. Due to optimized code and memory allocation, Blue Board boasted very fast performance for a BBS on that hardware platform. This speed combined with its use of the ASCII character set and XModem file transfer protocol rather than CBM ASCII and the Commodore-specific Punter protocol sometimes led users to believe that they were calling a BBS running on a much larger and faster computer.
Developer Sikes originally created Blue Board for his own BBS, called Blue Hell, which he ran from his home under the pseudonym "Beelzebub." He later went on to an Electrical Engineering degree from the University of British Columbia, then a long career in the video game industry, including as co-founder of Black Box Games (now part of Electronic Arts, where he worked as a programmer on the Need for Speed series of racing games, among others), before his sudden death while sleeping on December 24, 2007 at age 39.
Read more about Blue Board: Technical Innovations, Limitations, Supported Hardware, Decline in Popularity
Famous quotes containing the words blue and/or board:
“The extra worry began it—on the
Blue blue mountain—she never set foot
And then and there. Meanwhile the host
Mourned her quiet tenure. They all stayed chatting.
No one did much about eating.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“This morning I threw up at a board meeting. I was sure the cat was out of the bag, but no one seemed to think anything about it; apparently it’s quite common for people to throw up at board meetings.”
—Jane Wagner (b. 1935)