Mark writes in with the following information:

PowerBoard was written and maintained as a commercial BBS software package in the late 80's/early 90's (89-95) by Scott W. Brown. The software was written for use in an MS-DOS environment. It was written at first with Microsoft QuickBASIC and then was migrated to BASIC-PDS and used additional extensions from PDQ. PowerBoard was customized with a proprietary, BASIC-like language called "PCL" (PowerBoard Control Language). To my knowledge, it was one of the first, if not the first, commercial BBS software packages on the market to do so on such a scale.

Other major players in the market like PCBoard didn't have this level of flexibility for at least two years after PowerBoard became available.

Scott was inspired by the capabilities of of another software package called RyBBS that allowed BBS session menus to be altered in flat-file, but he was not completely satisfied with their level of power and flexibility, hence the creation of PowerBoard from scratch. I am not Scott W. Brown, he would know much more about the internals of PowerBoard than I as he wrote it.

The software was available in single-node and multi-node configurations, with multi-node being possible with the use of a task-switching environment such as DesqView or OS/2 2.x or later.