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:
“Little Boy Blue,
Come blow your horn,”
—Mother Goose (fl. 17th–18th century. Little Boy Blue (l. 1–2)
“On board ship there are many sources of joy of which the land knows nothing. You may flirt and dance at sixty; and if you are awkward in the turn of a valse, you may put it down to the motion of the ship. You need wear no gloves, and may drink your soda-and-brandy without being ashamed of it.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)