Worldgroup

Galacticomm's successor to The Major BBS. It still supported regular old console and RIP BBSing, but also provided another option: the Worldgroup client. The sysop could design a completely graphical representation of the traditional Major BBS menu system, and Windows users with the client installed could have an AOL- or Prodigy-like experience, depending on how creative the sysop was. There was also a default that simply created an icon for each menu option, for the lazy sysops. Galacticomm seems to have been bought out by netVillage, and Worldgroup has survived only as a Web-based service for "legacy" customers.

The Internet, and the Web in particular were primarily responsible for the death of Worldgroup.

WorldGroup BBS was a BBS system developed by Galacticomm around 1995. It was nothing more than a graphical front end added to their best selling product MajorBBS that allowed Windows users to navigate the BBS in a graphical fashion. It was quite powerful for what was around at the time, and by far less expensive than Mac-based FirstClass or Wildcat! BBS, that were the alternatives at the time.

WorldGroup was quite powerful, but it was a completely closed system where every stupid add-on with any functionality cost over $99, and its licence was quite limitative. One amazing thing was the server software: it run in DOS using a DOS extender and featured a custom operating system with DLLs with which, by using a simple Pentium-class machine with 16Mb RAM and intelligent serial circuitry, you could handle neary one hundred simultaneous user sessions!

Being used to the openness of the Fidonet world, WorldGroup was very hard to customize and modify (its own custom pages had an awful editor and were not compatible with anything), and importing Fidonet mail required a complex array of C programs and PERL scripts to work.

Though being quite powerful (it included mail, conferences and e-mail with offline reader, a file sharing area, instant messanging, graphical teleconference with whiteboard, user profiles and more) it did not encounter so much success, and so Galacticomm went belly up after releasing a web-based version (v3.0) circa 1998.