IMAGE BBS
(A short history)

To understand the history of IMAGE BBS we must go back a few years to the
mid 1980s. At that time the Commodore 64 was an extremely popular computer
and there were literally thousands of Bulletin Boards up and running.
Probably the most popular was C-Net. At that time the prevailing version
was 9.6 or previous versions written by Ken Pletzer. He finally came out
with a 10.0 version which was the last version Ken Pletzer wrote for the
Commodore 64. (Ken Pletzer held the copyright and owned Perspective
Software, the marketing company for C-Net.)

The next C-Net version was to be written by Don Gladden (version 11.0) but
Don had a fire at his home and was unable to do the work so Ken Pletzer
turned to another programmer (Jim Selleck) who produced the 11.0 version
of C-Net. The version was released prematurely and was riddled with bugs,
and that, coupled with Perspective Software's notoriety for total lack of
support caused them to rush a "totally de-bugged version 11.1a" to all
11.0 owners. The 11.1a, which was supposed to be 11.0 with nothing new but
all the bugs fixed turned out to have new features and many new bugs. As a
result Ken Pletzer and Perspective Software turned to Don Gladden to
produce a new version.

Don Gladden, working with Ray Kelm, produced version 12.0 for Perspective.
It was based not on 11.0 but rather on the last version Ken Pletzer had
written, 10.0 and was a much improved version. Still, in his zeal to
release the software on time Ken Pletzer rushed the release of 12.0 and it
was released before it had some of the features Don and Ray had wanted to
incorporate. Also, it did have quite a few problems and would not run on
certain hardware configurations. The Lt. Kernal was relatively new at that
point (1987) and I had one so I got involved with doing a lot of 'repair
work' with several other programmers (Little John, Blinky, Gear Jammer,
etc.) Who formed a group called CSSC or C-Net Sysop Support Centers) where
we made sure the mods were available to make C-Net run on our hard drives.

Shortly after 12.0 was released Don and Ray began working on 12.1a. It was
to be the finishing touches on 12.0 and would contain the enhancements
that they had wanted to put into 12.0 but had not been able to.
Perspective made plans to sell the upgrade for $7.98 and began taking
orders and promising a release date in June of 1988. I was doing much of
the beta testing on the new version and was running monthly phone bills in
the $500 to $700 region.

As June approached there was a "bash' planned and the release party was
arranged to take place at Don's house in Michigan. Many of us traveled
long distances to be there, I took along my new 2400 baud modems so we
could write the 2400 routines which were not yet written for 12.1. Alas,
when we had the party we found that the 12.1 was not ready for release
though some people were permitted to download it knowing that it was a
'beta version.' At that get-together Don and Ken had a discussion that
resulted in Don leaving Perspective Software. The arrangement between them
was that either of them could break off the relationship if they chose.
Don chose to do so and they parted fairly amicably (though not totally).
Don and Ray took the program (12.1a) and made the appropriate changes that
Ken Pletzer demanded. Things that he felt were closely identified with
C-Net. Those changes were made and NO legal action was taken by either
side regardless of rumor to the contrary.

Don left Michigan and moved to Utah where he completed the program, with
me doing the majority of the beta testing. The program was now called
IMAGE 1.0 and we had formed a company called New Image Software. IMAGE 1.0
was released on November 8, 1988. It was quite some time before the first
minor bug showed up and 1.0 was hailed as one of the most 'bug-free' BBS
programs around.

After 1.0 Don did little more with the company. Ray worked on a new
version, 1.1 which was released in February 1989. It proved to be a
disaster as it had a serious problem on IEEE drives. We immediately quit
shipping it and Ray worked the bugs out, rewrote the ML routines, redid
all the BASIC routines and we finally released the 1.2 version in November
of 1989.

We followed the release of 1.2 with the release of the Networking and the
Relative File message bases (called the turbo-rels). We later released a
set of 'mods' that made 1.2 fully compatible with the CMD hard drive --
called the CMD Mods -- which made 1.2 into 1.2a. We later released the
necessary 'mods' to allow for high speed modems to be used with Swiftlink
cartridges.

In addition to the IMAGE BBS we have had available six PFILE disks (now
released to public domain on Port Commodore) and three double sided
graphic disks.

Ken Pletzer continued with Perspective Software, he wrote the 128 version
of C-Net, gave the C64 version back to Jim Selleck who produced DS2. Ken
also dropped the C-Net 128 Version and wrote the C-Net Amiga version which
he later dropped and went on to pursue an IBM Version.

Don Gladden left New Image and is now in California. Ray Kelm is in
Michigan and John Moore in Philadelphia are working on an IBM version of
IMAGE. We have programmers working on a 2.0 version of IMAGE but are not
sure if it will be released.

This file was written by Fred S. Dart for New Image Software

fdart@ix.netcom.com