Page "Bulletin board system" Paragraph 18

MS-DOS continued to be the most popular operating system for BBS use up until the mid-1990s, and in the early years most multi-node BBSes were running under a DOS based multitasker such as DESQview or consisted of multiple computers connected via a LAN.

( Around 1990, OS / 2 came out with " preemptive multitasking " of DOS, an alternative to DESQview for multi-node BBS.

) In the late 1980s, a handful of BBS developers implemented multitasking communications routines which, although run under MS-DOS, allowed multiple phone lines and multiple users to connect to the same physical BBS computer.

These included Galacticomm's MajorBBS ( later WorldGroup ), eSoft TBBS, and Falken.

Though most BBS software had been written in BASIC or Pascal ( with some low-level routines written in assembly language ), the C language was starting to gain popularity.