Monochrome BBS
Monochrome BBS, known to users as "Mono", is a text-based multi-user bulletin board system featuring thousands of discussion files, along with games, instant and deferred user messaging, and a talker.
History
The software (mono - small m) was originally written in around 1990 by David Brownlee, then a student at City University, London, for his final year project. Once the board was up and running, fellow students were given accounts, and word began to spread. The first non-City users were admitted in 1991-1992. Eventually Mono's userbase became international, although the majority of those joining were UK university students.
Mono became a vibrant community: Users regularly organised weekend-long events to meet and socialise at various places around the UK, and Mono itself had a very social feel with so much discussion and chat going on in files, by message or in the talker. Like any other healthy community, it has brought people together in marriage, brought children into the world, and mourned deaths amongst its members.
By its peak in the mid-1990s, over 8000 accounts had been created, and there were often more than 150 people logged in simultaneously. However, with the advent of web forums and GUI-based instant messaging, Mono's text-only format began to seem archaic, and it struggled to attract new users. Most of those now using the system are long-time members.
Operation
Mono's interface was designed for ease of use - most operations are performed using single keypresses, and the options available are shown on-screen wherever possible, so it is relatively straightforward for a newcomer to start making their way around without reading lots of documentation.
Files are organised hierarchically by topic into menus and submenus. A file is composed of edits (comments). While reading a file, a user may add a comment to it, send part of it to another user, email it and so on, again using keypresses which are given on-screen. The Esc key may be pressed at any time to provide a menu of additional facilities such as the talker and messaging systems.
The talker takes some cues from MUDs by being composed of rooms, for which users write the descriptions, and a visitor may wander through these using the cardinal directions. What you say is only relayed to people in the same room, and rooms may be locked by their owner for privacy.
The messaging system (u2u in Monochrome slang) allows sending messages directly to one or more other users. If a recipient is logged in, the message is received immediately and the recipient's client displays the message or, if they are in the middle of editing a file, beeps to alert them and displays it when they finish. Otherwise, the message is stored and shown to them when they next connect.
Technology
Users connect to Monochrome via telnet or SSH. There are a wide variety of clients for this purpose, such as PuTTY, or you can connect using the Java client on the Monochrome website.
The server cluster runs NetBSD, and consists of a single central server and several client machines. Users connect to the client machines, which in turn interrogate the central server in order to process the user's commands, and handle rendering the results. This implements a form of redundancy - users may still access Monochrome even if one or several of the client machines fail (the server is still a single point of failure). Most of the communication between the client and the server is cross process using sockets, but files are directly read from the server via NFS. This means it is not currently possible to host a remote client outside of the cluster (unless the entire NFS volume were to be globally accessible, which would pose a large security risk).
Most of the core client and server code is written in C, though a number of additional utilities have been written in Perl.
The cluster was historically based on Sun Microsystems machines (most often, old disused or discarded machines from universities or businesses), but is now on a mixture of Sun and Intel PC hardware.
