WWIV - The Rise of WWIVnet

The Rise of WWIVnet

Registration also provided permission to link to the main network, WWIVnet, which soon connected thousands of boards together into a network spread across several nations. Boards in a WWIV network are identified within the network by a node number. Local e-mail within a board was sent by sending a message to a BBS user's user number (the sysop always being user 1). However, to e-mail a user at another board within a WWIV network, the @ sign would be added (similar to an internet e-mail address), followed by the node number. In the case of WWIVnet, node number 1 was a WWIV BBS named Amber, the BBS run by Wayne Bell in the South Bay region of Los Angeles County, California. The e-mail address 1@1 on the WWIVnet belonged to him. The Dragon's Den, another important node of the WWIVnet BBS network (@5252), was operated in Austin, Texas by Wig De Moville (a.k.a. "Filo"), who assumed the position of administering the sales of the WWIV source code.

Wayne Bell wrote and released the "Net30" program which made the joining of WWIV bulletin board systems possible, which was not freely available. WWIVlink was the next WWIV-based BBS network to be created that did not require the member BBS systems to be registered. As versions of WWIV became available that would support WWIV-networking "plugins," there were suddenly dozens of new WWIV networks such as IceNET (run by Jim Nunn in Buffalo, New York), FILEnet (run by Dennis Myers in Richmond, Virginia) and WWIVlink, TerraNET (run by Cris McRae), EliteLink, ChaosNET (centered around Jacksonville, Florida), and TriNet around Washington DC. It soon became very common for systems to be members of multiple networks. One drawback of being a part of multiple networks was that in order to transfer your mail packets for each network, separate calls were necessary. One system operator named Jayson Cowan developed a program called Linker that combined those packets into one that would be routed properly on the receiving system. The receiving system had to be configured to accept those network packets and agree to have their system process them. Linker played an integral part of increasing the popularity of systems being on more than one WWIV based network.

As the Internet began to rise in popularity and availability a new method of packaging WWIV messages for transport by internet email was developed. The test network (PPPnet) was a great success. It later was merged into FILEnet, which provided for the transfer of large files between systems. The merged FILEnet shortly became the backbone for WWIV-based network traffic over the Internet, eliminating costly long distance calls as well as the need for Linker.

At their peaks, the large WWIV-based networks each had:

• WWIVnet, 1700 systems
• IceNET, 850 systems
• WWIVlink, 675 systems
• TerraNET, 470 systems