RelayNet was an

e-mail Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving Digital media, digital messages using electronics, electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the ...

exchange network used by

PCBoard PCBoard (PCB) was a bulletin board system (BBS) application first introduced for DOS in 1983 by Fred Clark's Clark Development Company. PCBoard was one of the first commercial BBS packages for DOS systems, and was considered one of the "high end ...

bulletin board system A bulletin board system (BBS), also called a computer bulletin board service (CBBS), is a computer server running list of BBS software, software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user perfor ...

s (BBS's). By 1990, RelayNet comprised more than 200 bulletin board systems. BBS's on RelayNet communicated via a

communications protocol A communication protocol is a system of rules that allows two or more entities of a communications system to transmit information via any variation of a physical quantity. The protocol defines the rules, syntax, semantics (computer science), sem ...

called RIME (RelayNet International Mail Exchange). RelayNet was similar to

FidoNet __ / \ /, oo \ (_, /_) _`@/_ \ _ , , \ \\ , (*) , \ )) ______ , __U__, / \// / FI ...

in purpose and technology, although it used names for its nodes instead of Fido's numeric address pairs. Due to it being limited to PCBoard, it carried a much smaller amount of traffic than Fido. RIME was built up, starting in 1988, from a master hub owned by Bonnie Anthony, a local Psychiatrist, in

Bethesda, Maryland Bethesda () is an unincorporated, census-designated place in southern Montgomery County, Maryland, United States. Located just northwest of Washington, D.C., it is a major business and government center of the Washington metropolitan region ...

and a subordinate hub owned by her brother, Howard Belasco, in The Bronx, New York. Kip Compton, in high-school at the time, played an important role in the software's development and evolution. Dr. Anthony died in 2015.

, created by Clark Development Corporation (CDC) in

Salt Lake City Salt Lake City, often shortened to Salt Lake or SLC, is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Utah. It is the county seat of Salt Lake County, the most populous county in the state. The city is the core of the Salt Lake Ci ...

Utah Utah is a landlocked state in the Mountain states, Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It is one of the Four Corners states, sharing a border with Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico. It also borders Wyoming to the northea ...

, was always a "premium" BBS system and fairly expensive. For this reason it was limited mostly to larger multi-line BBS systems, where it was particularly well liked due to its "nice" behaviour on the network when running off a common

file server In computing, a file server (or fileserver) is a computer attached to a network that provides a location for shared disk access, i.e. storage of computer files (such as text, image, sound, video) that can be accessed by workstations within a co ...

. However this also meant that the PCBoard market generally consisted of a small number of large systems, as opposed to a large number of small ones, hence RIME had usually only a few hundred member boards. Thus RelayNet, which originally ran only on PCBoard, did not have the same level of infrastructure as FidoNet, and didn't build the sort of global organizational structure that FidoNet needed. Instead, RelayNet evolved as a series of smaller regional networks, including the NANET hosted by Canada Remote Systems, RoseNet hosted by their competitors Rose Media, QuebecNet, FINET, Smartnet, Intelec, ILink, U'NI-net, Friendsnet and others. RelayNet software later appeared for a variety of other BBS systems, including RBBS, GAP, EIS, QBBS and

Wildcat! BBS Wildcat! BBS is a bulletin board system server application that Mustang Software developed in 1986 for MS-DOS, and later ported to Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphica ...

, but these systems also provided excellent FidoNet support and RelayNet was never popular on anything other than PCBoard and its close competitor, RBBS-PC. On August 1, 2007, Don Barba, owner since the late 1990s of the RIME network, its software, and since the late 1980s of Moondog, its central BBS in Brooklyn, New York, announced that all would close on August 15.

See also

References

Further reading