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:
“When the inhabitants of some sequestered island first descry the “big canoe” of the European rolling through the blue waters towards their shores, they rush down to the beach in crowds, and with open arms stand ready to embrace the strangers. Fatal embrace! They fold to their bosoms the vipers whose sting is destined to poison all their joys; and the instinctive feeling of love within their breasts is soon converted into the bitterest hate.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“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)