Technical innovations
Among BBS software available in its day, Blue Board was notable in that it made creative use of the computer's limitedLimitations
Because all user accounts and message headers are stored in the C64's limited RAM, which had to be shared with the program itself, the program only supported up to nine message areas and nine download file areas. Further limitations include a maximum of 239 user accounts, and a four-character password length. Each time the BBS was started, the sysop would have to enter the time of day, because the Commodore 64 has no real-time clock hardware. In addition, starting up the program was cumbersome. First, the program itself had to be loaded and run, then the RAM-resident user and message data had to be loaded, and then the disk had to be replaced with the message text disk. The whole process took several minutes.Supported hardware
* Commodore 64 or 128 *Decline in popularity
At the peak of Blue Board's popularity (the latter half of the 1980s), many Blue Boards were in operation, and the software was widely pirated. As 8-bit computing fell into decline, so did Blue Board. The availability of more powerful hardware such as the Amiga, Macintosh, and entry-level PCs made feasible the development of more powerful BBS software in high level languages without the need for the kind of extensive optimization employed by Blue Board. However, Blue Board was instrumental in the social development of online culture in Vancouver which relied on text messages and email rather than file downloading, so it remained perfectly suited for that purpose long after the C64 platform became obsolete. It was not unusual in the early 1990s to find Blue Boards still thriving while BBSes run on far more powerful computers languished or were relegated to shareware file depositories. The real death-knell to Blue Board was the rise of multi-line chat systems, starting with DDial and progressing to STS and MajorBBS. It is not known whether any Blue Boards are still operational today.External links