History
The Windows Source was a dial-up BBS out of Evansville and Newburgh, Indiana. It took its first callers in late April 1994 and went dark on New Year’s Day 1996. About 20 months, start to finish.
This is the story pieced together from the board’s own backup: the menus, the logs, the message base and the art. For the rest of the local scene, head over to evansvillebbs.com.
dial 812-476-4534 (the old number, long since reassigned, so please don’t call it. Telnet in instead.)
By the numbers
Counts come from the user file and logs in the surviving backup. The call total is the board’s own counter; the 773 accounts left in the backup account for 21,069 of those calls. Callers also moved 5,255 downloads (about 1 GB) and 747 uploads. Node 1 was a 28.8 modem.
Timeline
| Jan 1994 | The board software gets registered. |
| Apr 29, 1994 | The first callers sign up. The regulars all show up within a few days of each other. |
| May 1994 | Busiest month for new users: 68 sign up. |
| Fall 1994 | Craig writes his own door programs in Turbo Pascal. The board starts billing itself as the home of CRAIGWARE. (More below.) |
| Dec 1994 | The busiest month in the surviving message base, mostly the anime echo: Ranma ½, Sailor Moon, Tenchi, and pictures sent as multi-part UUencoded posts. |
| Early 1995 | BBS lists from early 1995 show a Newburgh number for the board. |
| Apr 1995 | The main menu gets its last makeover. |
| May 1995 | The FidoNet nodelist lists it as “Windows Source Node 1 -=28.8=-”. |
| Jul 1995 | The Barren Realms Elite door gets updated for the league game. |
| Nov 1995 | BRE players start asking: “Is Windows going down…” |
| Dec 23, 1995 | Craig tells the River City Net hub the board shuts down on Jan 1, 1996. |
| Dec 31, 1995 | The hub sends the last batch of mail: “It’s been fun.” |
| Jan 1, 1996 | The final FidoNet bill shows a $1.99 balance. The Windows Source goes dark. |
“Different is good!!”
Every new caller got a welcome letter from the sysop. It pitched over 8,000 files, thousands of messages from all over the world, and a subscription line for only $10 a year. And it owned up to the board being a little unusual:
“This BBS is set up a little different than most BBS’s, but different is good!!”— Craig, the new-user welcome letter
Each forum on the main menu was a file area and a message base in one: Windows, Domestic Realms, the Anime forum, Star Trek, DOOM Players, BBS Talk, The Light, Tech Talk, the RPG forum and The Windows Pub. There was a For Sale board, a Welcome Wagon for people new to BBSing, offline mail for QWK and Blue Wave readers, and a chat button that put up “Paging Craig, Hang On…”
It was also one of Evansville’s earliest free internet email services, gated through FidoNet. Exact dates are still being confirmed.
The sysop sent the form letters himself. Upload 25 files and you got this:
“I have upgraded your secruity level becuse you have been such a GREAT help… You have uploaded 25 files!!!!!”
And on your birthday: “Sorry, I fogot to get ya a present!! (G)” (1995 spelling kept as is.)
The look
A board called The Windows Source had to look the part. Craig’s brother Chris Kohler drew the art. Callers with a plain terminal got his ANSI screens. Callers with a RIP terminal got full graphics made to look like Windows 3.1: gray dialog boxes, clickable buttons, even the logo. Holiday screens swapped in on their own (New Year’s, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s, Earth Day, Halloween, Christmas), and the goodbye screen changed at random every night. Chris also had his own “Top Secret” RIP area.
RIP screens rendered with RIPtermJS by Carl Gorringe. ANSI screens rendered with ansilove.js. » See the full gallery
The Arcade
The Arcade menu had about 35 door games. The big ones were Legend of the Red Dragon, TradeWars and Barren Realms Elite. Then there was Usurper, Global War, Imperium, Planets!, Yankee Red, Ultimate Universe, The Pit casino, Drag Race, Murder Motel, BBS Golf, Dog Track, Knights & Knaves, a stack of card and board games, Trek Trivia, and two games made just for RIP, RIPMine and RIPVersi.
Barren Realms Elite was the serious one. The Windows Source played in the BRE812 league with other boards in the 812 area code, and the turns traveled between boards over FidoNet. When word got out in November 1995 that the board was closing, the players worried the game would die mid-season. The league admin told them to hang in there:
“You guys still have 5 weeks of game time left!… Don’t give up the ship!”— the BRE echo, November 1995
The game ran right up to the end.
On FidoNet
The Windows Source was node 1:2310/3 in Net 2310, River City Net, which covered southern Indiana, southeast Illinois and northwest Kentucky. Every night the board traded mail with the River City Echo Hub. It carried about 35 echoes, from BBS Talk, Star Trek and anime to DOOM, shortwave, Pascal programming, sysop support and the BRE812 league.
None of that was free. The hub billed echo fees every month, about $3.67 to $4.14, and Craig paid the hub by paper check. Craig helped other sysops get set up too. In November 1995 he answered a fellow sysop’s mailer questions with “glad to see you finaly start to get on the ‘Fido’ train.”
The neighbors (May 1995 nodelist)
The other boards in River City Net in May 1995:
- River City Echo Hub
- The Data Connection
- Husky Den BBS
- EVSC BBS
- Pinnacle Club
- Digicom (Evansville)
- Pipline BBS (Glasgow, KY)
- Soloman’s World (Reynolds, KY)
- The Last Outpost (Cannelton, IN)
- Space Link (Owensboro, KY)
The rest of the local scene, with dozens of Evansville-area boards, River City Net’s history and the Courier’s own BBS, is at evansvillebbs.com. There, Windows Source turns up in the FidoNet nodelists from 1994 until January 1996, first as 1:2310/2 and then as 1:2310/3.
CRAIGWARE
In the fall of 1994 Craig started writing his own door programs in Turbo Pascal. His reasoning, from the docs:
“I wrote this becuse I thought evey BBS should have one without having to pay extra for it. This program doesn’t have 1000’s of featurs…”— Craig, BBSUList SYSOP.DOC, Sept 1994
In about two weeks (Sept 23 to Oct 8, 1994) he had three of them running on the board. The main menu called it “the HOME of CRAGWARE BBS software.” Visiting sysops could hit ! anywhere to jump to the CRAIGWARE file area, and other mailers could file-request CRAIG to get the list. They were freeware: copyrighted by Craig, free to use, and free to pass along.
2026 screenshots of the original 1994 programs running in DOSBox-X. The tagged files and the sysop name are made-up test data.
- TagCheck 1.1
- Oct 1994. Runs at logoff. If you tagged files and didn’t download them, it lists them with the total size and tells you to come back. Multi-node.
CWTAGCHK.ZIP 21 KB, EXE + SYSOP.DOC + configs
- BBSUList 1.3β
- Sept–Oct 1994. A user list door. Reports by security level, calls, downloads, uploads, credits, group or sex, in short or long format.
CWBBSUL.ZIP 21 KB, EXE + SYSOP.DOC + configs
- FFind 1.0
- Oct 1994. A flag-file checker for batch files. On the board it kept a second caller out of Barren Realms Elite while someone on another node was playing.
CWFFIND.ZIP 17 KB, EXE + configs
These are 16-bit DOS programs from 1994. Run them in DOSBox or a DOS VM. They speak DOOR.SYS, DORINFO1.DEF, PCBOARD.SYS, CHAIN.TXT and the other drop files of the day, and run locally with /L. Not to be confused with the other 1994 “TagCheck” or “CraigWare” programs out there.
More about Craig and CRAIGWARE at craigkohler.com.
The night it went dark
By late 1995 Craig was working at a computer store, and the board was getting harder to keep up. On December 23 he sent a note to the River City Net hub:
“my BBS will be shuting down on Jan. 1 of 1996… this X-Mass break from work is the only thing that gave me time to do it… I work at a computer store called Busy Bytes on the east side of Evansville, stop by sometime.”— Craig to the Net 2310 hub, Dec 23, 1995
On Christmas Eve a regular posted a goodbye, thanking Craig “for having one of the best BBSs in town.” On New Year’s Eve the hub sent the last of the mail and signed off with “It’s been fun.” The final FidoNet bill showed a $1.99 balance. The nightly maintenance ran one last time early on January 2, 1996, and then the whole board sat in a backup for 30 years.
Back online
In 2026 that backup turned up on a home NAS, and the board is back on the air as a telnet BBS with the original menus and Chris’s art. Call it from your browser or telnet to bbs.windowssourcebbs.com. Old accounts were kept, with their handles and public posts, and locked. If you called The Windows Source back then, you can claim your old account. Progress is in the journal.