Why SpitfireBBS.com Exists
I was online before the Web.
Not “online” in the sense we use the word today, with browsers, social networks, streaming services and a seemingly infinite Internet waiting behind a search box. My online world arrived through a telephone line, the handshake of a modem, an 80-column terminal and another computer somewhere on the other end.
For me, one of those computers was running SPITFIRE BBS.
And eventually, it was mine.
The Mystical Realm
Hi, my name is Craig.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, I used an IBM-compatible computer with an internal 2,400-baud modem connected to a telephone line to explore the growing online world. I dialed into local bulletin board systems—BBSs—and, as Internet access became available, used early tools such as Gopher and Archie.
In the early 1990s, I operated The Mystical Realm BBS in Tucson, Arizona. It was one of several local boards that formed the Spitfire SysOps Coalition of Tucson. Others included Black Dragon’s Lair (Nodes 1-3) (Jerry Schneider), Meridith Place BBS (Richard Transue--who was also our local CircuitNET hub), Snowball Express (Steve Holland), and Potbellied Stove (John Winger).
Mystical Realm was very much a product of the BBS era: ANSI screens, message areas, downloadable files, door games, and connections to larger communities through networks such as FidoNet and CircuitNet. The board had its own personality, its own regular callers, and its own little corner of cyberspace.
It ran on SPITFIRE, the bulletin board software created by Mike Woltz and Buffalo Creek Software.
An archived Tucson-area BBS listing still preserves Mystical Realm—and my name—among the boards operating in 1992. Decades later, the resurrected Mystical Realm is once again listed among active BBS systems.
There was another side to my BBS days as well.
Desert Nights BBS was the adult-oriented counterpart to Mystical Realm. It served a different audience and had a different personality, but it grew out of the same wonderfully decentralized culture.
That was one of the fascinating things about BBSing.
A Sysop wasn’t creating an account on somebody else’s platform. The Sysop was building the platform.
One board might be devoted to role-playing games. Another might revolve around programming or amateur radio. Another could become a local watering hole. Some were family-oriented, some technical, some strange, some irreverent, and some decidedly adults-only.
Each board had an identity because there was an actual person behind it.
When a Phone Number Was an Address
It is difficult to explain to someone raised on the Internet just how local the BBS world originally was.
Your modem didn't connect you to everything.
It connected you to someone.
Often that person lived only a few miles away.
Long-distance telephone charges created natural geographic boundaries, so the people you encountered online were frequently the same people you might eventually meet at a computer show, user-group meeting, pizza place or BBS gathering.
A BBS wasn't a service used by millions of anonymous accounts:
- It might have dozens or hundreds of users.
- The Sysop knew many of them.
- Users knew one another.
- Reputations mattered.
- Communities developed personalities.
And when you hung up the modem, that little world effectively disappeared until somebody called again.
There is something about that model of computing that I never completely stopped appreciating.
The Web Arrived
Eventually the Internet escaped the universities, corporate networks and hobbyist gateways and entered everyday life.
The Web exploded.
Modems became gateways to Internet service providers rather than individual computers. Search engines replaced file directories. Web forums replaced message bases. Instant messaging replaced Sysop chat.
Then came social media, smartphones, cloud services and enormous platforms capable of connecting billions of people.
We gained an extraordinary amount.
But I think we lost something, too.
The Internet gradually changed from a collection of places people built into a collection of platforms people joined.
Today's online world is extraordinarily convenient, but much of it is mediated by recommendation engines, advertising systems, engagement metrics and corporate data collection. The software decides what you should see next and quietly watches what you do with it.
A BBS was different.
There was no algorithm trying to keep you angry enough to remain connected.
Nobody was constructing an advertising profile because you downloaded a file.
There wasn't an infinite feed.
You entered a place, looked around, talked to people, played a game, downloaded something interesting and eventually typed G for Goodbye.
The network was smaller.
In some ways, the world behind it felt bigger.
Returning to the Realm
Decades later, I decided to bring Mystical Realm BBS back.
The new Mystical Realm runs under Synchronet on Linux rather than SPITFIRE under DOS, and telephone lines have given way to Internet connections. What was once primarily a Tucson community can now be reached from virtually anywhere.
It is again connected to FidoNet, where Mystical Realm appears today as 1:114/10, and it continues to explore the message networks, door games, ANSI artwork and other pieces that made the original BBS experience distinctive.
I don't consider that an attempt to pretend it is 1992 again.
It is an experiment in what happens when some of the best ideas from that era are allowed to live in the present.
That's an important distinction.
I don't want to put the past behind glass.
I want to keep it running.
RetroRealm
That same philosophy eventually grew into RetroRealm.
RetroRealm is my broader home for preservation, experimentation, storytelling and general tinkering around the computers and communities that helped shape the digital age.
There are projects involving Commodore systems, Tandy machines, emulation, Raspberry Pi and appliance-style builds, classic software, BBS experimentation and whatever other rabbit hole happens to have my attention.
The idea behind it is summed up in its tagline:
Portals to the tech that made us.
I am interested in preserving old software, but I am just as interested in understanding it.
How did it work?
Why was it designed that way?
What did people build with it?
What can we still learn from it?
And occasionally:
What would happen if we built it again?
That last question eventually brought me back to SPITFIRE.
Why SPITFIRE?
SPITFIRE was created by Mike Woltz and released through Buffalo Creek Software beginning in 1987. Mike wrote it in Turbo Pascal with assembly-language routines and built the program around a refreshingly straightforward philosophy: make it small, fast, understandable and useful to the Sysop running it.
That philosophy mattered.
SPITFIRE gave ordinary computer owners the ability to operate their own online community. Through message areas, file libraries, door programs, ANSI displays and third-party networking tools, a PC sitting in someone's home could become a destination.
Thousands did.
SPITFIRE continued evolving for more than twenty years, ultimately reaching version 3.7 in 2010, but its architecture remained rooted in the DOS world in which it had been born.
For me, however, SPITFIRE is more than an entry in BBS history.
It was the software underneath Mystical Realm.
It is part of my history.
That is ultimately why SpitfireBBS.com exists.
Preservation First
The first mission of SpitfireBBS.com is preservation.
Software.
Documentation.
Utilities.
Newsletters.
Artwork.
Stories.
Networks.
Sysops.
And especially the work of Mike Woltz and Buffalo Creek Software.
The software itself can be archived in a ZIP file.
The harder thing to preserve is the context around it.
Why people chose SPITFIRE.
How Sysops configured it.
What utilities grew around it.
What the support community was like.
How SPITFIRE boards communicated.
What Mike's design philosophy meant in practice.
And what it felt like to encounter one of these systems when the sound of a modem connecting meant you had just arrived somewhere.
That history deserves a home.
But preservation is only half of the idea.
What If SPITFIRE Had Never Stopped?
There is another question that has been rattling around in my head:
What would SPITFIRE look like if it were designed today?
Not SPITFIRE running inside DOSBox.
Not the original executable wrapped in enough compatibility layers to convince it that 1992 never ended.
And not a web forum wearing ANSI artwork as a costume.
I mean a genuine, modern BBS system built from the ground up for current computers while carrying forward the ideas that made SPITFIRE appealing in the first place.
A modern SPITFIRE should still feel like a BBS.
ANSI and text terminals should matter.
Message bases should matter.
File libraries should matter.
Door games should matter.
BBS networking should matter.
The Sysop should still be able to shape the system into a distinctive place rather than merely configure someone else's hosted service.
But underneath that familiar surface could be a system designed for modern operating systems, modern networking, contemporary security practices and hardware Mike could never have reasonably targeted when SPITFIRE first appeared.
The objective isn't to recreate Mike Woltz's source code.
It isn't to pretend to speak for him.
And it isn't to replace the original SPITFIRE.
The original deserves to be preserved as the original.
The idea instead is to explore what a spiritual continuation of its philosophy might become.
Small.
Fast.
Understandable.
Customizable.
Sysop-first.
And fun.
A new system carrying an old flame.
Full Circle
There is a certain symmetry to all of this.
More than thirty years ago, I sat behind a computer in Tucson operating Mystical Realm BBS with SPITFIRE.
The Web came.
The BBS world faded.
I spent the decades that followed working with computers, networks, servers, websites and the increasingly enormous infrastructure behind our modern connected world.
And eventually I found myself wanting to build a BBS again.
So Mystical Realm returned.
Then came RetroRealm.
And now SpitfireBBS.com.
Maybe that is nostalgia.
But it isn't only nostalgia.
These systems represent another philosophy of computing: understandable machines, software owned and controlled by its operator, communities small enough to have identities and technology that invited people to tinker with it rather than merely consume through it.
Those ideas are still worth exploring.
So SpitfireBBS.com exists partly as an archive, partly as a workshop and partly as a thank-you to the people who created the online world many of us inhabited before anybody thought to call it social media.
The original SPITFIRE belongs to Mike Woltz and the history he created with Buffalo Creek Software.
Mystical Realm is part of my history with it.
And somewhere between those two histories may be the beginning of something new.
The carrier may be gone.
The Realm is still answering.