An excellent posting from Don Brown in COMP.BBS.TBBS gives a nice overview
of WWIV and WWIVnet:
"WWIV (World War Four) is a BBS that was written by Wayne Bell in the early
80's as a high school programing project. He shared the software with 25
friends and soon the need arose to share messages from one board with all
the rest. WWIVnet was born from this need. Originally programed in basic,
more power was needed and WWIV was redone in Pascal and then moved to "C".
In all its forms WWIV's source code has always be available to registered
owners. This encuraged sysops to develop new features for WWIV and these
ideas were released as "Mods" that others could add to their own copies.
There are many professional "C" programmers that got their start poring
over WWIV source code. WWIVnet was also available to those that registered.
In its hayday there were over 1500 BBS's connected through this world wide
network. Yes, it was much smaller than FIDOnet, but the sysops were very
involved and dedicated to BBSing, as a result a small core of systems are
still running and more importantly still developing WWIV...."
In the proposal for COMP.BBS.WWIV, there is this description of the whole
situation:
"At one point, WWIVnet was the world's largest proprietary
BBS network. That can no longer be considered the case, as systems
running Waffle and VBBS are now part of the network. WWIV is coming
into its own as a BBS software. For quite some time, continued
development of the software floundered as author Wayne Bell tried to
juggle both development and administration functions for the software.
He turned the administrative chores over to another sysop about 8
months ago, and development efforts have come along rather nicely.
WWIV-based networking had previously consisted of the following:
WWIVnet (run by Wayne Bell and based in California), WWIVlink (based
in Illinois) and IceNET (based in New York). One of the more recent
additions to the networking software was the ability to create
multiple networks. This has led to a million or so little RadDudeNets
(as so named by one WWIVnet sysop, as WWIV does appeal to a lot of
teenagers and pre-teens) popping up all over the place. The three
aforementioned networks still stand out today as the only truly
significant national WWIV-based networks, though. In years past,
WWIVnet has had some gating (all external and often very klunky) to
Fidonet and Usenet. Usenet gating is now accomplished more easily by
the WWCP gateware, but that runs with Waffle and connects to WWIV."
WWIVnet definitely dwarfed WWIVlink.