Haven BBS: A bit of History

Haven BBS was first started up in the fall of 1992, using the Major BBS V5.202b. It started out slow, and kept going slow, who would want to log on to a one line Major. I was taking maybe around 5 calls a week.
The reason we went with Major BBS originally was twofold. We won a free copy of a two line license for Major, also we were the most familiar with Major BBS as we spent a lot of time on them. My third BBS, that I can remember spending any time on, was a Major BBS called Infinity BBS, which was run by a local computer company.

So we set up Haven BBS under the Major BBS Software. It ran from Late September/Early October 1992 to February 1993. In December we decided to switch software. We were trying different ones out to see if we liked them. We figured that what we really wanted was for Haven to be was a message board. We picked Zinfandel, which was a Citadel clone. Its main feature is messaging. We ran Zinfandel from February 1993 to October 1996. Zinfandel was written By Jason Massey, from code that Hue Jr. had released. Zinfandel had a lot of cosmetic changes as far as we can tell, and maybe some cleaning up of the code. We (ChuckE, WindowLover, and myself) wanted to get the source code to keep maintaining and adding to it. Jason decided he wanted to sell the source code to us for $150.00. Please note this is not a lot of money, but we could get the more updated Citadel-86 code for free and work with it instead. In fact I did download it soon there after.

In October 1996 we switched again, this time to Citadel-86, which was where Zinfandel had come from. Citadel-86 was still being updated, where as Zinfandel was not. We changed software and restarted all the message bases. We added in a few door games, and people were only playing one of the games. So we took the others offline. We were once again hooked up to the rest of the Citadel International network. Citadel86 served our purposes, it allowed us to get back in touch with the rest of the Citadel Network and would allow us to run door games. Files were still a weak spot, but that was fine as we were running this off a 386DX20, with 4MB of RAM and a 130MB HD.

December 1st 1998, we moved to the Citadel/UX network and got a partime Internet connection. We were generally connected to the Internet from 10:00 P.M. (Indiana Time) to 5:00 A.M. (Indiana time). In December 1999 we now added a full time Internet connection. At that time we were running off a Dell desktop. We were running Linux, on a Pentium Pro 200, 64MB of RAM, 6GB in HD, and a U.S. Robotics Courier V.Everything modem for dial in. We also have it on a UPS. In 2007 we upgraded to a P3-650, 512MB of RAM and a 20GB hard drive. We ran that hardware till we shut down the BBS in 2011.

  • July 1992, Haven started as a private BBS for a few close friends any myself. Running the built in BBS software in Procomm Plus.
  • September 1992, Haven switched to Major BBS and got a dedicated phone line.
  • February 1993, Haven switched to Zinfandel BBS software.
  • October 1996, Haven BBS changed from Zinfandel to Citadel-86.
  • December 1998, Haven BBS changed from Citadel-86 to Citadel/UX.
  • December 13th 1999, we added a full time Internet connection.
  • March 1st 2000 we upgraded to Citadel/UX 5.62, and WebCit 2.11.
  • March 5th 2000, We moved to a new machine, new location, and a better internet connection.
  • January 2, 2002, Haven BBS moved to a new machine that only has Haven BBS on it.
  • 2007 - We upgraded to a P3-650, 512MB RAM, and a 20GB HD. We also moved to Debian Linux as the OS for the BBS.
  • May 1st 2011 - Haven BBS shutdown.