Brian A. Diaz writes "Just as I was thinking back on the old days of BBSing and doing some research, I came across your page and saw the entry for Marshware BBS.

"In actuality the original version of the program was called Marsh BBS and was written by Matt Arrington (longtime contributor to Antic! magazine and creator of one or more versions of the the ProTerm telecommunications software for the Atari 1030 modem. He made the Marsh BBS program available for a very reasonable price at the time (around 1985 I think I paid about $24.95 for the two diskette set).

"I was about 13 years old and went to his apartment, as I lived in the same city as him (Torrance, CA), to purchase the program. He was still debugging it and I went back one more time for him to update my disk with proper coding. The program was primarily written in Machine language and was a great BBS program. It was very structured and very customizable at the same time. You could always tell when you were on a Marsh BBS but each one had it's own unique flavor.

"One of the classic Atari BBS sites of the time that used the Marsh BBS were "Fort Mac" run by Sarge (out of Fort MacArthur in San Pedro, CA). I also ran a few versions of the Marsh BBS that some people may remember; "Dodge City", then finally "The Farm". My handle at the time was Farmer John.

"He actually gave his BBS its name after a natural untouched marsh that still sits in the middle of Torrance, CA, called the Madrona Marsh. Hence his BBS, The Madrona Marsh.

"At any rate thanks for your time. The good old 8-bit days seem to have been a lifetime ago."

John Hardie writes " I ran a BBS on the Atari 8-bit called the Earthport 2 BBS in San Antonio Texas. I ran the BBS on Marsh software but the BBS was definitely in Basic, not ML as you have listed. I always remember that was one of the great things about it, that I could edit it and add my own code for functions that didn't exist."

It would be good to get a copy of this software, and its various versions.