Rick Root writes "Hi, Saw your BBS documentary web site, and I wanted to share some interesting information with you. One of your listed BBS software packages is PicoSpan. Picospan was written by Marcus D. Watts for M-Net, the world's first public access UNIX system - or at least so they claim. M-Net is still up and running after all these years (it went online in 1982). If you have any interest, you can telnet://m- net.arbornet.org or visit www.arbornet.org Marcus has since abandoned M-Net for another BBS in Ann Arbor known as Grex. Grex was an offshoot from M-Net from 1991 when a group of users got tired of the then owner of M-Net constantly threatening to shut it off. Grex has been operating continuously all this time as well, and in fact has historically kept *ALL* of its content available. they reset their general conference with the seasons, and I've been able to go back and read stuff that I posted way back in 1991. telnet://grex.cyberspace.org or http://www.cyberspace.org. Grex still uses Picospan. In the early 90s, M-Net actually converted to a program called YAPP, which stood for Yet Another Picospan Program, written by Dave Thaler. He wrote it as a project I think while working on his CS degree at the University of Michigan. The YAPP homepage is: http://www.armidalesoftware.com/yapp/yapp.html It's worth mentioning that The Well, quite possibly one of the most famous BBSes, was also an offshot of M-Net, someone indirectly, and The Well also ran Picospan. Jan Wolter wrote a very interesting piece relating to the history of computer conferencing in Ann Arbor. http://www.unixpapa.com/conf/history.html I've been using M-Net since 1986, and I still log in pretty much every day."