Multiline
BBS Software written in the early 1990's by Richard Gillman. In its
heyday, nearly every successful multiline BBS was run on this software owing to the fact that it was fast, and ran on more inexpensive hardware than some of the other multiline boards out there. Compared to some of the other BBS systems, like
WWIV, or
Wildcat, DLX was incredibly simple. File transfers were limited to using either
XModem, or
YModem.
Doors, for multiuser games, were nonexistant. What made the program stand out, however, were the
multiuser features.
DLX had chat functions which, in many ways, surpassed many of the Internet based chat systems, such as IRC. The sysop could create up to 32767 chat rooms, and theme each room to a specific style. The most common feature on DLX boards was a Trivia room, in which a few times a week, a designated person would hold a trivia game, usually for nothing more than personal satisfaction and the chance to show off all of the useless knowledge one has acquired. Other features DLX boards occasionally had were "dark" rooms, in which persons could speak anonymously, age-restricted rooms, gender restricted rooms, or many more.
Version 7.0 was released in early 1994, and marked the end of DLX. The author had grown tired of the work, and released the entire work, including source code, into the public domain. Newer multiline BBS software had been released, such as Renegade, and Major BBS, plus the older single line software, such as the aforementioned WWIV and Wildcat, had been modified to run under multi-tasking environments, such as Desqview, to gain most of the multi-user advantages DLX had. As a result, the BBS software which was originally designed to run multiple nodes comfortably on an XT with as little as 1MB of RAM was beginning to show its age.
After the final release of DLX, most systems runnning the software either migrated to other systems, but a few kept running the old software. These systems became fewer and fewer as more and more sysops grew tired of the hobby of hosting a BBS, and more and more people began using the internet, leaving BBSs to be just a memory.