BBS: TELESC.NET.BR
Assunto: Re: Looking for screensho
De: Digital Man
Data: Fri, 27 Feb 2026 17:22:00 -0800
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hbRenb: hcRe: Looking for screenshots/a
bBynb: hcNightfox bto cpoindexter FORTRAN bon cThu Feb 26 2026 09:46 amn
> PF> Digiboards! They rocked. I had a 16 port digiboard running a dial-up
> PF> WAN back in those days - I was working for a large retailer with 100
> PF> stores. The POS system in the stores was essentially a DOS box, and
> PF> when they shut down at night, it ran a batch file we wrote to zip up
> PF> sales, credit card data and inventory data, then send it to the hub.
> PF> The hub system was an OS/2 box running a package called Excellenet,
> PF> using a 16 port digiboard.
>
> PF> There was a special driver, might have used int14h, a protocol used to
> PF> share modems over the LAN. The digiboard had 386 processors on it, it
> PF> did most of the processing on-board. We had 16 modems on it, and when
> PF> the east coast stores would close, they'd all be busy.
>
> It sounds like those Digiboards were pretty serious units. I think it would
> have been fun to run a multi-line BBS using one of those, but I didn't have
> the money at the time.
Synchronet supported Digiboards (Steve Deppe added the support for their int14h driver), but I don't think a lot of (Synchronet) sysops used them. Usually, it wasn't too hard to get 3 or 4 IRQs available for COM ports (I sold multiport 16-bit UART boards that were easy to configure) and running *more* than 3-4 nodes on a single PC (e.g. with DESQview at the time), reliably, was pretty challenging. So the Digiboards didn't really solve the main problem of running a lot of lines/nodes on a single computer, and that problem was the (lack of) a performant and reliable multitasking OS for the PC.
I think I still have a new in the box Digiboard in my garage somewhere (I didn't use them for my 6 or 7 BBS nodes either).
--
HYdigital man n(rob)
Synchronet "Real Fact" #111:
Weedpuller "World Of My Own" http://youtu.be/V-gmT5N6kYo
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