J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Bill in Co
writes:
[]
As I recall, some of the BBS services were used to get updated program
files, or for some add-ons for the program, and were often hosted by the
manufacturers. But in addition to these, there were some that were
analogous to newsgroups for customers to participate in, with posts
relating
to hardware and software issues. And I seem to recall using Procomm for
this.

These were (as I recall) pretty much DOS-based services, with basic text
screens (character displays only, limited to the basic ASCII set, like in
DOS), although I think some later programs allowed you to run it in a DOS
window, like Procomm Plus. But my memory may be off.
[]
Well, some of them would work whatever was at your end, but some of them
actually ran the software you used to access them at their end,
including drawing your screen - in character mode: quite a lot of use
was made of a standard that had codes for character movement, and I
think colours - I think it was called ANSI.

Yup, that's it. Which gave extended attributes to the basic ASCII
characters on a text screen, like different colors, blinking characters,
etc.

I remember now that I had
the equivalent software - what we'd now call a driver or DLL, I think -
locally, such that my DOS prompt was in colour, so that (say)

C:\this\that\theother\

had different colours for (IIRR) the C, the :, the \s, the , and the
rest (and from what I typed after them).
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G.5AL-IS-P--Ch++(p)Ar@T0H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

I believe the cake has got to be sliced up to help those who are needy and
you've got to keep someone there who's going to make the cake. Here we
always
destroy the people who make the cake. - Michael Caine (MM), RT, 7-13 Nov
2009.