A 1988 Amiga bulletin board system — back online_
► Connect to the BoardThe board runs on a real (emulated) Amiga — a true single line, one caller at a time, just like 1988.
● checking the board…
One line, the way it was in 1988 — if someone’s already on, the dialer holds your place until the line’s free.
🪫 Trouble ticket — June 2026: true to our roots, we caught a flying bug. Just like the old days, the board went quiet for a little while as we swatted it — rather fitting, since our sister board was The Flying Bug BBS. Pest eradicated, service restored. Enjoy!
Before the web, you reached the world through a BBS — a bulletin board you dialed into with a modem. You read messages, played door games, traded files, and chatted, all over a phone line at a few hundred bits a second.
This is Custom-BBS! — original software from 1988, running again on an emulated Commodore Amiga. Everything you see is the genuine article — the same code, menus, and message bases — reachable today from your browser.
Custom-BBS! was written by David Donley, David Dennis (RIP), and Joseph Gutwirth, with great assistance from Allen Stephens (RIP) and Michael Rivero. It was — and is — truly a work of love.
Written entirely in C — built with the Manx Aztec C compiler and edited in MicroEMACS — and compiled natively on the machine it ran on, Custom-BBS! was the first Amiga BBS written on an Amiga (an Amiga 1000), for the Amiga. True to its name, it was remarkably customizable — far more so than most other Amiga, or even PC, boards of the era — letting the sysop shape nearly every screen, menu, and prompt. It was also one of the first boards anywhere to offer Zmodem (added back in 1986) — with its multi-file batch transfers — alongside XMODEM and YMODEM. Running out of Hermosa Beach, California, it grew into a multi-line board, and by 1992 was running a U.S. Robotics Courier at a then-blazing 19,200 baud, and was one of the most popular boards around through the late 1980s and early ’90s.
It even ran online dating and matchmaking — years before the web had any such thing — and more than a few couples met on its sister board, The Flying Bug BBS, and found their soulmates.
And then there’s Jay Miner, the father of the Amiga, who loved the software and bought a copy. I called him afterward and offered a refund — “you’re the father of the Amiga, please take it for free” — but he refused. He wanted to support an Amiga software company. That was the kind of man he was.
Now, nearly forty years later, it’s awake again — the original code, recovered from the disks and running on an emulated Amiga, reachable from any browser. The boards have been silent for three decades. Log in, leave a message, sign the guestbook — and become part of the next chapter of Custom-BBS!
As my friend David Dennis used to always say…
“Enjoy!”
Photos and stories from the Custom-BBS! community — the machines, the setups, the people who made the scene. Share yours below (or post it on the [Y] Amiga Memories board when you dial in, or email the sysop). Every memory is reviewed before it appears.
Tip: log in as a New User to get your own account, or just look around.