Brian Dear writes: I wrote the COCONET HOST bbs software beginning in 1987. It was the first graphics-only (EGA) BBS product on the market, getting a rave review in a 1989 Boardwatch article. Starting in 1990 my company (Coconut Computing, Inc., based in La Jolla, CA) began advertising in numerous BBS magazines including BBS Callers Digest, Boardwatch, etc. We eventually created Mac and Windows client programs (the server software ran in Unix platforms like SCO XENIX). Some of the firsts for COCONET: * First fully bitmapped and vector-based graphics BBS software (client/server). * First to support bookmarks in message forums * First to support real graphical emoticons embedded in messages (ultimate BBS and other web based products started doing this years later) * First company to support PDF files (Adobe Acrobat) - in 1993! * First text file browser -- I wrote an HTML-inspired browser and released it in 1991 for COCONET -- it was not connected to the CERN WWW project, but I was aware of that, and inspired by the HTML/SGML work that Berners-Lee was doing on NeXT machines. The TextFileBrowser in COCONET enabled you to create "pages" which had embedded markup language in them for font changes, underlining, as well as image placement. Only thing it did not have,alas, was clickable hyperlinks. Oh well! * First BBS to have built-in support for playing MIDI music over the modem * First BBS client to have builtin JPEG/GIF viewing complete with Zoom capability (feature creep galore! :-)