Way back in 1986 I purchased an Amiga 1000 & also a 1200/75 baud modem. Thus 
began my love affair with BBS's. In the first few weeks I managed to rack up 
an enormous phone bill by ringing every BBS in Sydney (& a few elsewhere also)
listed in the Australian PAMS (Public Access Message Systems) List - the
fore-runner to the Australian BBS List. In those days there were a variety of
operating systems running on a multitude of machines, some of the more popular
BBS's ran under Opus & Citadel. Opus eventualy gave way to a clone system
called Maximus & Citadel's many forks finally culminated in the groupware app
that it is today.

Naturally I decided that I wanted to run a board too & experimented with an
early Amiga system called Tag BBS (not related to the BBS package of the same
name for the PC). I managed to get it up & running (on a single floppy drive 
no less!) but didn't have a "proper" modem. Fast forward to late 1987 & a 
friend introduced me to a piece of software called BBS-PC! on the Amiga. He 
had version 4.13 & it was a pirated copy, so no manual, just the basic help 
file that was included in the distro. I liked what I saw but was limited by 
the lack of documentation. So a ring around of various Amiga software sellers
ended with a parting of over $100 to purchase a legitimate copy and even better,
it was a later release (4.20).

On the 16th of October 1987, Landover Amiga BBS was born running on the A1000
with two floppy drives & a blazingly fast (and expensive) 1200 baud auto modem.
Landover was one of the earliest Amiga boards in Australia - at the time there
were two others, both ran under BBS-PC! also. The next year I purchased my
first IBM clone - naturally it too was a Commodore machine - a 4.77 MHz XT clone,
the PC5. It was equipped with a monochrome monitor, DOS 3.20, 640k of RAM & a 20
megabyte hard drive - to put it in perspective that's about four MP3 files these 
days.......

But alas! moving to the PC meant abandoning BBS-PC!, or so I thought. I had been
calling a BBS in South Australia that ran the same software except that the 
sysop of that board had managed to get a few external programs running under a 
doorway - something that at the time was inmpossible on the Amiga version, it
turned out he was running the Ms-DOS version. Shortly after he moved to a 16
line version of TBBS and sold me his original copy & manuals.

Moving to the PC version was going to be easy! Or so I thought. Unfortunately
the configuration files on the Amiga version were not compatible with the PC
release, so all messages, users & file descriptions were lost. However, the
BBS soon recovered & things were humming along smoothly again.

By the end of 1988 users were demanding Fidonet mail & door games, in the 
first instance, BBS-PC! had no echomail compatibility at all & in the second
instance there were very little external doors available for the software -
one noted exception was a native version of Chris Sherrick's Trade Wars 500.

By early 1989 the shortcomings of the software were starting to show & we 
swapped software to QuickBBS. However, for a brief time in 1992, BBS-PC! was
once again running on an experimental board (Avalon BBS) before it too was
converted to QuickBBS around 6 months later.