History

Megistos was written for a couple of affiliated BBS systems in Greece, AcroBase and G.A.T.E, currently colocated as the AcroGATE network (in Greek). Back in the early 90s, both systems ran heavily modified versions of Galacticomm's Major BBS. So heavily modified, in fact, that when version 6 of the software came out, we decided porting all our local software and modifications wasn't worth it.

It was decided that switching to Linux was a good idea. Many of our users were computer newbies, so the new system's user interface had to resemble the Major BBS as much as possible.

Despite that, we opted for a clean-room implementation, mainly for copyright reasons, but also because it would be pointless to do it otherwise. Even our own software (around 40% of the systems) was rewritten from scratch.

Anyone who's had the discipline-building experience of writing modules and add-ons for the Major BBS will immediately know why (when she recovers from the horrible trance-like flash-back, mumbling things like 'switch... state... substate').

As a useless bit of trivia, when coding started in 1993, there were maybe two or three other BBS packages for Linux, two of which were little more than sets of shell aliases (eek). Early comments identify Megistos as 'Linux BBS', which is dead presumptuous but indicative of the lack of Linux software back then.