How Ken Duda's Forum grew into a family of hacked bulletin boards

Every package in this story starts with the same few thousand lines of Turbo Pascal. A 1987 source archive of Forum-PC, the bulletin board program written by Kenneth J. Duda of Menlo Park, California, declares the program and all of its source code public domain and invites anyone to change it. Over the next seven years that code, and a later program built on it that escaped its author, turned into a family that sysops called the forum hacks: Emulex, TCS, LSD, ViSiON, ViSiON/2, ViSiON-X, Oblivion/2, Celerity, Alacrity and more. The distribution archives kept in Jason Scott's BBS Software Directory still hold their source files, manuals, credit screens and cracks, and they settle several questions about who wrote what.

The best single guide is a letter from Ken Sallot, the author of LSD, printed on the directory's Forum-PC page. "All of the forum hacks," he wrote, "were derived either directly from Forum 2.5 or from another of the forum hacks." The files bear out most of his family tree.

A public-domain board from Menlo Park

Forum-PC's information file names its author plainly. FORUM.INF opens with a box reading "Written by Kenneth J. Duda" and "Copyright (C) 1987 Kenneth J. Duda", then says: "This program, and all of its utilities, and all source code, is in the public domain. You are free to modify it in any way, and to distribute those modifications." Duda ran the Forum-PC Demonstration BBS at (415) 327-6786, asked anyone who improved the program to "call and upload them", gave his address as 590 Vine Street, and mentioned that he was "headed towards college next year".

Sallot explained why the code spread. "Ken Duda used to provide the source code for forum 2.5, and being in pascal it was easy for programmers to pick up and modify. The best thing about Forum was the io redirection." Duda had written a hook that sent everything printed with an ordinary writeln statement to the local screen and the modem at the same time, so a hobbyist could add a feature without writing any communications code.

The terms tightened. The Forum 2.50 source on the directory, which its file description says "will build under tp5+", shows a title page crediting "Version 2.5b by Kevin Boyles" and "Portions of this program Copyright (C) 1988-89, The Triumvirate". It calls the program "the property of Kenneth Duda", lets a user run, archive and modify it, and forbids "any distribution of this program, modified or otherwise, to be run on any machine other than your own". A comment in the unit says it "may NOT be modified" and that "calls to procedure titlepage may NOT be removed from the program". The hacks kept coming regardless. A 1992 package called Forum III, also archived, is described by the directory as based on Forum-PC 2.5 "but not written by Ken Duda".

Forum also fixed how its descendants were built. It has no menu files. Each menu is a call to a Pascal function with its valid keys written into the code, and the menu screen is a text file shown only when the caller presses the question mark or their help level demands it. To change a menu, a sysop changed the program and compiled it again.

The first generation

Sallot named Emulex, TCS, USSR and LSD as the direct descendants, with Monarch a possible fifth. Emulex is the best documented. Scott Kassos told the directory that it "started out as a 'hacked copy of Forum' that a few friends ran", by Sam Brown, Rigor Mortis and Shadow Lord, and that the name came from a time when it "emulated other BBS types, such as PC Board and Forum". The history in the Emulex/2 manual, written as Shadow Lord and signed "Scott", adds that Brown "began to tinker with Forum PC source code" in 1986, lost everything except an old 2.91 source when he moved to Georgia, and started again under Turbo Pascal 5.0 as Emulex/2. For version 2.00 Shadow Lord merged in his own program, Ghost Ship. Sallot called Emulex and Emulex/2 "probably the most influential 'forum hacks'".

One Emulex archive shows how far a label can drift. The Emulex/2 1.67 source was re-released as freeware in 1995 with a HOW2USE.TXT calling it "a derrivation of the Telegard 2.5 source code". Its own version string reads "Emulex/2 1.67 - Aug. 10 1989". Of the distinct source lines longer than 20 characters in that archive, 2,162 also appear in the Forum 2.1 source of 1988 and 58 in the Telegard 2.5i source. It is Forum code.

LSD, and the copy that got away

LSD stood for Lush Software Designs. A comment at the top of the 1.23Z source says it was "designed and hacked away at by The Slavelord", Sallot's handle, "and alot of help and ideas from other people", and closes with a warning: "Do not give this source out or you shall meet your death." The surviving archives run from 1.02, whose LSD.EXE is dated 27 July 1990, to 1.41 in April 1992. The directory labels that last archive "version 4.3", but its installer introduces itself as the "L.S.D. v1.41 Installation Program".

The warning failed. "The code was stolen and released when an account was compromised on the slaves den," Sallot wrote. "The released code was used as the basis for many of the other forum hacks (Vision, Oblivion, etc)." He believed LSD was the first forum hack to support FidoNet echomail and multiple lines, said that by 1992 the IO redirection was the only original Forum code left in it, and stopped in 1994 after his "first exposure to the web".

ViSiON and its three branches

The stolen LSD became ViSiON. Its 0.75 manual, by The Spectral Demon, says the program "was made and released (privately) around February 5th, '91". It credits Crimson Blade as programmer, The Elemental as co-programmer and The Spectral Demon as the "Dude Who Wrote Docs", who also contributed ideas, ANSI screens and beta testing. The 0.82 source of April 1991 is headed "ViSiON BBS Software Written by Crimson Blade & The Elemental" and carries the Ruthless Enterprises name, yet three of its units still say "Written by Ken Sallot (c) 1990". More than 8,800 of its distinct source lines also appear in LSD 1.23Z.

Sallot described the split that followed. "Vision, Vision/2, and Vision-X were all forum hacks based on the leaked LSD 1.21 source code," he wrote, and "only one of the three 'vision teams' was able to understand programming enough to fix the bugs."

ViSiON-X came next. The manual shipped with 0.91 in January 1992 says it "was started after the sudden downfall of ViSiON" and that "Warlord, the new found programmer, decided to start ViSiON-X. ViSiON-X is not a hack of ViSiON, but an update for it." Warlord signed the 0.90 and 0.91 release notes. From 0.95A in July 1992 to 0.99E in November 1994 the author named in the release files is Ryec. Crimson Blade appears in the ViSiON-X manual only in a list of special thanks, beside MaggotMan and SlaveLord.

ViSiON/2, subtitled "The Revision", was Crimson Blade's own continuation. The 0.84 builds date from December 1993 to April 1994, and by Beta B the WHATSNEW.V2 file names Net Distortion as co-programmer and sets the registration at $50, payable through Theft Of Services, the board it calls the "ViSiON/2 Home, Registration Center". Then the code escaped again. The developer who now maintains it as stlalpha writes that forum hacks "proliferated and their growth seemed to accelerate once the ViSiON .82 sourcecode was released which I believe was around mid 1992."

Oblivion/2, Celerity and Alacrity

Sallot puts Oblivion/2 on the same branch, "descended from LSD", and the FORUM.NFO file in the directory's Forum 2.50 archive describes that code as "the original BBS Software which ViSiON/2, ViSiON-X, Obv/2, Celerity, & others were based". The Oblivion/2 2.10 manual of 1993 credits Eric Katz, "Referred to as Darkened Enmity", and Rony Daher, "Referred to as Lord Tracer", trading as Darkflame Enterprises. For version 2.35 in 1996, Darkened Enmity "gave control to Murrary Stokely (also known as Shivan Bastard)". A "2.40" that appeared in 1997 is, in the directory's words, "a false release, made using a hex editor of version 2.30". By 1998 Transcentral Enterprises was handing out a serial-number generator with the note "This is not a hack, Oblivion/2 is now freeware."

Celerity came through TCS. Sallot calls it "a forum hack based on the TCS 1.50 source code" and "probably the most popular forum hack in 1990"; the text of a deleted Wikipedia article, preserved on mirror sites, says TCS 1.43, and no archive settles which. The 1.41 manual of August 1992 credits Brendon Woirhaye and Dave Hicks, promises "More flexibility than any other Forum clone" and acknowledges that "Forum is a trademark of Kenneth Duda".

Its sister, Alacrity, was in Celerity's later description "a special version of Celerity with an alternative menu structure". The revision history says Alacrity "was begun with Celerity v1.39", that at 1.40 it "was cracked and used by some disreputable people", and that at 1.41 it was discontinued and its art gallery and menu structure "moved to Celerity". Oblivion/2's history file records a borrowing across the branches: "Added support for Celerity pipe codes."

Neither the Oblivion/2 nor the Celerity source has surfaced. Their archives hold record definitions and utility code, not the programs themselves.

Art, registration and cracks

The forum hacks were sold on their looks, and the looks came from the art groups. ViSiON-X 0.91 shipped two complete menu sets, one signed by NaTaS of ACiD and one by TRACER of iCE, and its notes credit a "New WFC by TRACER" for the sysop's waiting-for-caller screen. The main menu of ViSiON/2's default set is signed "Menu by The Necromancer [iCE]". Oblivion/2 2.10 added "a new WFC screen. Made by FusioN of ACiD Productions", and its data disk carried menu libraries named V2SIM, VXSIM and LSDSIM; one of the V2SIM status screens is headed "ViSiON/2 The Revision".

Getting a copy was harder than downloading it. "Do not attempt to run ViSiON while it is unregistered," the 0.75 manual warned, or "your board will not last longer than a week if any of us find out about it." ViSiON-X cost $35, and "only a selected amount of boards in each area code" were allowed to run it. stlalpha remembers the rule more bluntly: "If you didn't know somone, you weren't going to run one of these." The ViSiON 0.82 source contains a procedure named Nuke_ViS, commented "To Stop the piracy of ViSiON BBS", that erases the program and overlay files.

The crackers answered. The directory keeps ViSiON-X 0.90 and 0.91 builds cracked by a group called THP. The 0.90 notes, signed Mr. Slippery, say: "I removed the registration code check from the program." Warlord's 0.91 README replied that there were now "multiple checks" and that on an unregistered copy "a BACKDOOR is Enabled". The cracked 0.91 removed a five-user limit and warned that there were "a few more backdoors to this program than Grim Reaper and Warlord wants you to believe."

Underneath the art, the code kept moving. On the early hacks a sysop changed a menu by editing Pascal and recompiling, and features moved between packages as pasted routines; stlalpha describes the result as "a smorgasbord of copy pasta from all sorts of places".

The other family tree

The boards that grew out of WWIV and Telegard look similar on screen and have different code underneath. The directory notes that the Telegard 1.6a source, though one file credits "Carl Mueller", is "very obviously derived from WWIV v3.21 by Wayne Bell". Telegard 2.x, by Martin Pollard, kept its menus in data files: plain-text .MNU files with fifteen header lines and seven lines per command, which a sysop could edit without a compiler.

Renegade, according to its second maintainer Ariven, was "originally created from the Telegard 2.5 source code by Cott Lang". Illusion's file description says it "was created from the Telegard v2.5g source code", and 4,324 lines of Telegard 2.5g recur in its later source; its 2.01 manual added, "The Telegard 2.5g source code has been floating around. We don't plan on making the same mistakes." In Impulse 7.1's record unit, 266 lines carry Telegard 2.7's field comments word for word.

Filing under Telegard is not the same as descent from it. The directory files Iniquity, by Mike Fricker, there, and its leaked a26 source follows Telegard's conventions for access codes and command keys, but only 187 of its 14,224 distinct long source lines appear in Telegard 2.5i. Eternity's 2.20 manual says it is "similar to Telegard in look and feel" but "not based on the Telegard source code at all". Insanity is the hybrid: its 2.1 source says it "originated with ideas from Telegard 2.5i, LSD 1.32r, Celerity 1.38, Emulex/2".

The attitudes differed too. Cott Lang, handing Renegade to Patrick Spence on 23 April 1997, said he had kept working on it "because I wanted something I could modify, I wanted something I knew was backdoor free". Jason Scott adds on the same page that Renegade's source "has been tightly controlled since its creation".

What survives

The software directory at bbsdocumentary.com remains the main archive, and every archive cited here downloaded intact on 26 October 2026.

In January 2022 stlalpha published "ViSiON/2: The Resurrection" on GitHub: the 0.84 code base, "poorly hacked past the y2k", packaged to run under DOS or in a Docker container, with a v.004 release dated 31 January 2022. ViSiON/3, written in Go under the MIT licence, calls itself "a work-in-progress refactor and modernization of the classic ViSiON/2 BBS software". Its repository was created on 13 March 2026; it released v0.1.0 on 22 March and v0.9.4 on 29 September, still labelled pre-alpha, and its logoff screen is the 1993 Theft Of Services art by The Dark Servant, unchanged except for line endings. Oblivion/2 XRM, a C++ "Extreme Remake" begun in 2015 and still "in very early development", was updated as recently as March 2026.

Renegade never stopped. Its official site lists version 1.40 for DOS as released on 1 March 2026. On 24 October 2026 its GitHub README announced "the LAST open Source build" and said that Renegade was going closed source again after a port to Free Pascal for DOS, Win32 and Linux.

RetroMake's "Other systems" menu reproduces several of these packages from the screens in their original distribution files. ViSiON shipped no screens at all, so its theme is drawn by running the drawing code in its released 0.83 source.