RemoteAccess

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The RemoteAccess waiting for caller screen

RemoteAccess is a MS-DOS Bulletin Board System (BBS) software package written by Andrew Milner and was published by his company Wantree Development in Australia. RemoteAccess was written in Turbo Pascal with some Assembly Language routines. RemoteAccess (commonly called RA) began in 1989 as a clone of QuickBBS by Adam Hudson. RemoteAccess was released under the shareware concept in 1990 and became very popular in the USA, Canada, Europe, and the South Pacific^{[citation needed]}. Initially the main advantage over QuickBBS was its ability to run multiple nodes under Microsoft Windows, Quarterdeck's DESQview and OS/2. RA could also operate over a network or even a combination of network and multitasking operating systems to provide multiple "nodes per station" capabilities.

RA quickly grew to become far more advanced than QuickBBS^{[citation needed]}, and the other QuickBBS clones which appeared soon afterwards including ProBoard, SuperBBS and EzyCom. RA was the first BBS software to support the popular JAM Message Base Format, which was partly conceived by RA's author, Andrew Milner. RA interfaced with message relaying systems such as FidoNet through 3rd party utilities such as FrontDoor and FastEcho. Some of these utilities were created by members of the RA beta team. With over 1500 titles, there were more third party utilities written for RA than for any other shareware BBS software.

Initially shareware, RA was also released in a commercial edition - "RemoteAccess Professional" - that was bundled with additional functionality to allow remote control over nodes over a network (RANETMGR, and RATSR).

Andrew Milner released his final version of RA (2.50) in 1996. By that time, many System Operators switched over from running Bulletin Boards to becoming Internet Service Providers. Milner was one such System Operator, and after version 2.50 he lost interest in further development^{[citation needed]}. In late 1997 Milner sold the RemoteAccess source code to Bruce Morse in the USA. Morse released some minor updates including a Y2K fix, but did not add any new features to the code. The final version (2.62) was released in August 2000. Bruce still owns the code today and RA is still available as shareware. There is also a commercial version with a few extra features.

RemoteAccess was never ported to a 32-bit version, but there were two clones of RA in the later years which did include 32-bit versions: EleBBS in the late 1990's which included DOS, Windows, OS/2 and Linux flavors., and MBSE, a few years later, which focused mainly on the Linux operating system.

While RemoteAccess never included internal telnet support, it can be run as a telnet BBS by using a telnet-FOSSIL driver or a Virtual COM port engine (NetFoss, NetSerial, or NetModem under Windows, SIO/VMODEM under OS/2).