SPITFIRE History

SPITFIRE was not a website and it was not a social network. It was a DOS program that let an ordinary personal computer answer a telephone, welcome a caller and become a place.

From homes, workshops and spare bedrooms, SPITFIRE Sysops built thousands of those places. They gave them names, drew their screens, chose their message areas, stocked their file libraries and decided what kind of community would answer when the modem did.

1987first released
2,111registrations by 1992
1,523boards then active
23 yearsfrom v1 to v3.7

Before the Web, a phone number could be a place

A caller reached a bulletin board by dialing its telephone number with a modem and terminal program. After the electronic whistle and crackle of the two machines negotiating a connection, the caller saw the board one screen at a time. There might be public and private messages, files to download, door games to play, bulletins to read and, sometimes, a live chat with the Sysop.

SPITFIRE supplied the machinery behind that experience: user accounts and security levels, message conferences, file areas, transfer protocols, ANSI and text displays, external “doors,” event scheduling and the data files that let an entire cottage industry of companion utilities grow around it. A board could remain a single telephone line or expand to multiple nodes under multitasking and networking environments such as DESQview, Windows, OS/2 and LANtastic.[1]

The technology mattered, but the scale mattered too. Long-distance charges kept many boards local. Callers and Sysops could encounter one another online and later meet at a computer show, user-group meeting or pizza place. Every board reflected the choices of the person running it. The Sysop was not joining somebody else’s platform; the Sysop was building the platform.

Mike, Ann and Buffalo Creek Software

Mike and Ann Woltz established Buffalo Creek Software in West Des Moines, Iowa, in 1986. The following year Mike released SPITFIRE, written in Turbo Pascal with assembly-language routines.[2] His design ideal was memorably direct: a “simple, small, fast, get-the-job-done” system—capable enough for a working BBS without becoming cumbersome or unaffordable for the person operating it.[1]

Buffalo Creek was recognizably a family business. Mike wrote and supported the software; Mike and Ann answered questions, processed registrations and upgrades, mailed disks and notices, maintained board lists and welcomed Sysops and their families to SPITFIRE conferences in Des Moines. The surviving Keeping in Touch newsletters sound less like corporate releases than letters from the center of a community: technical guidance sits beside congratulations, apologies, jokes, featured boards, newly registered systems and personal blessings.[3]

What does the name SPITFIRE mean?

The origin of the name is presently unknown. A review of the complete preserved 1992 newsletter run found no statement from Mike Woltz explaining his choice, and no primary source in the current archive confirms either an aircraft reference or an acronym. Mike did describe SPITFIRE in September 1992 as a “small, fast, simple, get-the-job-done BBS software package.”[12] That makes speed and performance a plausible interpretation, but it remains an editorial hypothesis rather than established history.

SPITFIRE was only one part of Mike’s life. His obituary also remembers a union representative, husband and father, computer programmer and musician with the band Freedom Road, later inducted into the Iowa Rock ’n Roll Music Association Hall of Fame.[4] That fuller life helps explain why the software’s history feels so personal: there was always a human being at the other end.

SPITFIRE’s defining idea was not that every board should look alike. It was that a Sysop should have understandable tools for making a board distinctly their own.

A working timeline

  1. Buffalo Creek Software begins

    Mike and Ann Woltz establish the family-run company in West Des Moines, Iowa.

  2. SPITFIRE enters the shareware world

    The DOS BBS system is released for evaluation and distribution. Registration turns the same core into a licensed working system and connects a Sysop to Buffalo Creek’s support and upgrade community.[2]

  3. Version 3.2 and a high-water mark

    Buffalo Creek’s year-end count records 2,111 registrations, with 1,523 version 3.2 boards believed still active—a 72 percent rate by Mike’s calculation. The list spans the United States and boards in Canada, Australia, Europe, Israel, Singapore, New Zealand and beyond.[5]

  4. Version 3.3 ships at 3:30 a.m.

    Mike announces what he calls a clean, solid release. It includes Lakota, SPITFIRE’s QWK mail door, while volunteer download sites help distribute individually licensed copies alongside mailed diskettes.[6]

  5. Sysops meet in Des Moines

    The 1993 SPITFIRE Conference combines workshops, support and social time. Mike wrote that earlier conferences had created lifelong friendships—evidence that the community extended well beyond the phone line.[7]

  6. Version 3.4 adds RIP graphics

    The release supports optional RIPscrip screens, including mouse-driven control panels for callers with compatible terminals. Four days later, Buffalo Creek reported that 803 Sysops had already upgraded.[8]

  7. An ecosystem grows around the core

    Doors, log analyzers, bulletin makers, file-list tools, user editors, network interfaces and other add-ons appear from Buffalo Creek and independent authors. SPITFIRE boards exchange mail and files through systems including QWK networks, FidoNet and CircuitNet.[9]

  8. Version 3.6 addresses the year 2000

    SPITFIRE is updated for Y2K-era operation while remaining rooted in the DOS architecture its Sysops understood.[11]

  9. Version 3.7 arrives

    The surviving manual identifies version 3.7 as a January 1, 2010 release—twenty-three years after the original. Its distribution still includes the executable, overlays, Lakota, utilities, display files and nearly 600 KB of documentation.[1]

  10. From a living product to a living archive

    Mike died on December 20, 2022, two days before his 77th birthday.[4] Buffalo Creek’s website and downloadable files survived into the Web era; today, scattered disks, mirrors, newsletters and personal collections are being brought back together so the software and its context are not lost.[10]

The software was only the center

The core package gave a Sysop a working BBS, but the larger SPITFIRE world was assembled from many moving parts. Lakota let callers read and answer QWK mail offline. SHILOH and third-party tools moved messages between boards. Doors added games and specialized services. Utilities maintained user and message databases, generated bulletins, packed logs, built file lists and watched nodes.

Period file directories make the scale visible. Alongside the SPITFIRE disks are programs for subscriptions, CD-ROM file areas, statistics, message-base cleanup, FidoNet processing, DESQview operation and tasks as specific as appending a FILE_ID.DIZ description to SFFILES.BBS.[9] Some survive in multiple archives; others are known only by a filename and one-line description. That is why preserving the ecosystem matters as much as preserving SPITFIRE.EXE.

The networks made an equally important difference. A local board could carry conversations from other cities and countries, while file distribution networks moved new programs from system to system. In March 1993, Keeping in Touch explained plans to place SPITFIRE software on the FidoNet Filebone. The same newsletter series records boards using CircuitNet, RIME, PCRelay, VetLink and smaller interest-based networks.[6] The board still had a local identity, but it no longer had to be an island.

A community with a paper trail

The surviving newsletters are the closest thing SPITFIRE has to a running diary. They preserve release notes, hardware frustrations, policy disagreements, programming plans and troubleshooting, but they also preserve the people: boards of the month, first-time Sysops, couples running systems together, support-board volunteers and families planning trips to Des Moines.

They also correct the clean, inevitable-looking version histories that are easy to write decades later. Releases involved late nights, damaged diskettes, download arrangements, memory limits, undocumented tricks, bug reports and changes prompted by users. The October 1993 issue, for example, moves immediately from celebrating version 3.4 to documenting a multi-node caller-count glitch.[8] SPITFIRE’s history is not simply a procession of numbers. It is the record of software being worked on in public with the people who depended on it.

When the Web changed the map

As commercial Internet access and the Web became ordinary in the mid-1990s, many callers began using their modems to reach an Internet provider rather than one local computer. Web forums, email, instant messaging and downloadable archives absorbed many of the jobs a BBS had performed. Some Sysops shut down. Some changed software. Some became Internet providers. Others kept their boards alive, moved them behind telnet connections or returned years later through emulation and virtual machines.[2]

SPITFIRE’s long release history makes that transition unusually visible. It began when “going online” commonly meant dialing one computer and ended its official release trail in an age of broadband, smartphones and social media. Through it all, it remained recognizably a DOS BBS: small, configurable and centered on the operator rather than a remote platform owner.

Why preserve it now?

An executable can tell us what a program did. It cannot, by itself, tell us why a Sysop chose it, how callers experienced it, what support felt like, which utilities became indispensable or how friendships crossed from a message base into everyday life.

That is the purpose of SpitfireBBS.com: to preserve the software and the world around it. Craig Daters’s Mystical Realm BBS ran SPITFIRE in Tucson during the original dial-up era. Bringing that board back decades later led to a broader effort to collect releases, manuals, newsletters, artwork, stories and the work of Mike Woltz and Buffalo Creek Software.

This is a growing history, not a claim that every piece has already been found. If you operated, called or supported a SPITFIRE board—or have disks, screenshots, correspondence, registrations, conference photographs or stories—the missing context may be sitting in your collection or memory.

Read Keeping in TouchSearchable editions of Buffalo Creek’s support newsletter. Explore the softwareCore releases, companion tools and preserved utilities. Conferences & networksThe people and connections between individual boards. Why this site existsCraig’s personal route from Mystical Realm to preservation.

References and further exploration

  1. Buffalo Creek Software. SPITFIRE Bulletin Board System, Version 3.7, manual and utility disk, January 1, 2010. Preserved in the SpitfireBBS.com documentation archive.
  2. “Spitfire (BBS).” Wikipedia, with citations to the original software and newsletter archive. Useful as a later overview; contemporary Buffalo Creek records take precedence here. Read the article.
  3. Buffalo Creek Software. Keeping in Touch, surviving 1992–1995 issues. Browse the newsletter archive.
  4. “Michael David Woltz.” McLaren’s Resthaven Chapel & Mortuary obituary, December 2022. Read the obituary.
  5. Woltz, Mike. “Notes from the author of SPITFIRE!” Keeping in Touch, January 1993. Read the issue.
  6. Woltz, Mike, et al. Keeping in Touch, March 1993: version 3.3 release, Lakota and FidoNet Filebone coverage. Read the issue.
  7. Buffalo Creek Software. Keeping in Touch, May and June 1993: conference dates, planning and community notes. May issue; June issue.
  8. Woltz, Mike. Keeping in Touch, October 1993: version 3.4, RIP graphics and early upgrade figures. Read the issue. The release date is also visible in a period BBS file index.
  9. Period software catalogs. The Lost Archives file listing preserves dozens of SPITFIRE-related descriptions; the BBS Software Archive preserves a version 3.1 package and utility material.
  10. Buffalo Creek Software website. Preserved snapshot and free-download pages in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. View the archived site.
  11. NetFoss User’s Guide. “SpitFire BBS Usage,” documenting the 1999 version 3.6 release and later telnet operation through a virtual serial connection. Read the guide.
  12. Woltz, Mike. “Notes from the author of SPITFIRE!” Keeping in Touch, September 1992. Read the primary source. The negative finding about the name is based on review of the complete preserved 1992 run.

For the wider world in which SPITFIRE boards operated, Jason Scott’s multipart BBS Documentary collects oral histories across the dial-up BBS era.

A note on the record: BBS history is scattered across aging media, mirrored file areas and personal recollection. Contemporary Buffalo Creek material is treated here as the primary record; later summaries are used to cross-check it. This page will be revised as stronger or more complete evidence surfaces.