Software related in some fashion with "Metal BBS".

Joshua Levitsky writes "You have that it was related to METAL. This is true. METAL was Mega Extensive Telecom Alternative Language. Basically The Captain made MACOS which was a hack on Acos that added arrays and better ways to compile all your scripts. Good debugging. When you bought Acos you get GBBS which was really not so wonderful but it got people going. MACOS got you able to do much more. But the creator of Acos did not really appreciate that people were running MACOS becuase most people would not actually buy Acos that ran MACOS. It was running many of the Apple II pirate boards. I actually bought a transfered license from someone for Acos to be legal. Anyways in an effort to avoid jail The Captain wrote METAL which had no code from Acos at all. (so far as we know).. but it had the same grammar for writing code. It had the arrays that MACOS gave us, and numbers could be as high as 8,000,000. (Acos only went to 32,000 in a variable.) So METAL was this wonderful thing as a compiler. It needed something to really demonstrate what it could do. So FutureVision was that thing. I ran Haz-Mat which was a FV board. I came to it after working some on OggNet which was a private network built off of GBBS boards. I helped fix some chunks of code in that. FV was very attractive because of FutureNet."

"So FutureNet not only linked all the FVnet boards together for email / filemail / message boards, but it also gave us mail gateways to the internet and newsgroup gateways. METAL / FV boards were not really pirate boards the way that MACOS boards were. It was discussion that was the thing. We all enjoyed talking to one another and it gave us USENET access before most people had it so there were so many interesting academics on it and none of the garbage that pollutes the Internet today."

"I miss the days spent writing this stuff. If I remember correctly I was the one that got filemail to work on FutureNet. Some silly boolean math error would make it so that the mail app wouldn't tell you that a file was attached. I spent the day figuring out boolean math in my parents house while in high school. In retrospect not so hard.. but back then it was problematic for me."