Welcome to the re-birth of Vertrauen, a Synchronet BBS.

Oh, the history... Vertrauen was born a one-node BBS running WWIV v4.02 (I think that was the version). Anyhow, it's a long story, but it inspired me to write my own BBS software (started writing it toward the end of 1990). Vertrauen started running Synchronet (the name of the new software) in the summer of 1991.

In the summer of 1992, Synchronet became a commercial product and my sole source of income and remained that way until the fall of 1995 when the commercial value of BBSs (and BBS software) dropped dramatically due to the rise in popularity of the World Wide Web and other Internet-based services.

Vertrauen continued to exist, but it was no longer any fun to run (it had become primarily a support board for Synchronet sysops) and it was a financial burden (running eight phone lines, a satellite dish, and 4 PCs full-time can add up). So, without (much) warning, Vertrauen was shut down and the future of Synchronet seemingly along with it, in February of 1997. In April of that year I divorced myself from Synchronet completely and released the complete source code to the public (free of charge).

I've continued to monitor Synchronet support mailing lists and web-boards, but without even having a copy of Synchronet installed on my machine, I couldn't be of that much help. I put up a full-time ftp and web-site (www.weedpuller.com/synchronet) to hold all the files and information about the program, but haven't updated it in over a year.

So why the sudden re-appearance of digital man, Vertrauen, and
Synchronet?

What can I say? Baseball season is over? I'm not exactly sure. I guess it just occurred to me that I've had a full-time broadband (cable modem) connection to the Internet for about a year and a half and that it wouldn't really be
that hard to make a 32-bit multi-threaded telnet-only version of
Synchronet (all nodes running in a single process).

I started looking around and was surprised at the number of telnettable BBSs and their usage (some were even running Synchronet!). I was inspired to at least "try it". For some strange reason, it actually sounded like "fun"!

I've always hated FOSSIL drivers and these new Telnet/FOSSIL applications (NetModem and COM/IP) are only kludges in my eyes. The BBS must be a native 32-bit application (initially Win32, since I run Windows 98 predominately).

Well, here it is, sooner than expected, the multi-threaded/multi-user Win32 telnet-only version of Synchronet. I'm calling it 3.0 currently, but something like Synchronet/IP isn't out of the question either. I registered the domain name synchro.net where I plan to keep all the latest and greatest
versions of Synchronet and maintain a list of Synchronet BBSs, etc.

Vertrauen will remain at vert.darktech.org (for as long as darktech will allow). I plan on putting a small web/ftp site on that domain too. I hope Vertrauen can once again become a fun and informational place to visit. Now that the signal-to-noise ratio on BBSs appears to have improved substitally, I look forward to stimulating conversations and competitive game-playing.

Welcome back! And if you've never been here before, Welcome. :-)

Rob (digital man)