"Paul Swanson's BBS with RAM disk. Paul Swanson was a programmer from the Boston, Massachusetts, USA, area. I'm not sure whether his BBS for the Atari 8-bit has been placed into the public domain or not. This BBS was the first to support a RAMdisk, which Paul Swanson called a "V:" device for "virtual disk". This BBS was written in Atari BASIC and required a joystick hardware "dongle" device. This was notable as being one of the first Atari 8-BIT BBSes that could actually go for a week without having to be rebooted. Pointers to the message base were kept in an Atari "very long string" (for which Atari BASIC is famous). The BBS would only have problems (for the most part) if this string became corrupted." - Atari FAQ

Steve Richardson writes "I wanted to provide some additional info for your big BBS list about an Atari 8-bit BBS called "Nitelite," which I ran (sporatically) and modified (extensively) from 1986-1989."

"Paul Swanson was indeed the author. He was located in Billerica, MA."

"The software was not RAMdisk-centric, as the description seems to indicate. Later versions may have supported RAMdisks natively, but I don't recall any version that I ran inherently doing them. I recall hacking RAMdisk support into the BBS myself somewhere along the way."

"The software was indeed written in Atari BASIC. The "dongle" which the description mentions was actually not meant for security, but it was a "ring detector." The mid-life Atari 300bps modems (1030, and later XM301) did not have the capability to detect the phone ringing. When you ran a BBS using one of these modems, you needed to plug the dongle (which Paul included when you bought the software) from the phone line to the joystick port. This allowed the computer to detect when the phone was ringing, which would cause it to instruct the modem to pick up and offer a carrier tone."

"I was later (1987-1988ish) the (un-)lucky owner of an early Atari 1200 baud modem, which was their first offering that supported normal Hayes modem commands and did ring detection. I recall that the BBS author had no interest in offering support for this modem, so I hacked support for that as well. This finally allowed me to get rid of that silly dongle device."

"I shared a version of Nitelite with the above and several other modifications with the only other Worcester-area licensed Nitelite SysOp I knew. We re-branded it "NL/PRO BBS" (Nitelite Pro) and ran it on several of our own short-lived BBSes."