Renegade (BBS)

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Renegade is a bulletin board system (BBS) software program written for IBM PC-compatible computers.

[edit] History

The Renegade BBS software was originally derived from the Telegard BBS source code and was written in the Pascal programming language by Cott Lang.

Stability, ease of use, and Lang's decision to make Renegade available to prospective system operators free of charge led to its immense popularity among the BBS scene.

Following the rise of the Internet and the subsequent decline of BBS usage, Lang handed over the project to former third-party software developer Patrick Spence in April of 1997. Spence and Gary Hall maintained Renegade for three years, releasing over time the first set of upgrades in a number of years.

Jeff Herrings, another former third-party software developer, was named active programmer by Spence in January of 2000. Herrings, who released a public alpha version of Renegade in March of 2000 addressing Y2K-compliance problems, stepped down as active programmer in October of 2001 citing lack of time and desire.

Although Herrings declared the program dead, a number of programmers stepped up with interesting ideas for the future of the Renegade software. Spence eventually handed the program over to Corey Snow in 2002, who intended upon releasing an open-source, Java-based clone of the software which never saw the light of day.

Herrings released his Y2K-compliant source code to the public via the Dreamland BBS in September of 2005.

[edit] Current Information

T.J. McMillen and Chris Hoppman together received the source code for Renegade BBS software in October of 2003. Chris Hoppman stepped down from the project in 2004 and is no longer involved. This left McMillen, once again, alone to find someone else to code renegade all by themselves.

With little free time, Renegade idled for more than a year until April of 2006 when McMillen (also known as Exodus) added the talent of Lee Palmer to the Renegade team to replace Hoppman. Palmer (also known as Nuclear) is a former third-party software developer for the T.A.G. Bulletin Board System. Current testing and coding is in the works on another update and some third-party utilities for the current version of Renegade. The current work is now being coded under "The Renegade Development Team" name, which mainly includes McMillen and Palmer, but leaves the door open if others are needed.

The Renegade Team has released an update on June 30 2006 and another update on September 30 2006 as well as a full release for this cycle version. Updates are trying to be made and released every 90 to 120 days to help keep interest and the project alive.