Motavar writes: "I am the author of the Axis BBS software written in the early 90's. AXiS is a WWIV hack completely rewritten to support multithreading support allowing multiple copies to run at once.

"You may wonder where AXiS and other "Forum Style" bbs softwares came from. Well.. half the forum style boards are actually WWIV hacks. With the purchase of the WWIV bbs software admins would receive a free copy of the source code for "Modding". While many of us "kids" (ages 14-18) did not have jobs ( or a dollar to our name ) we would download the latest copies of the source code from friends and play around with it changing features. There was a huge following of people who did changes (mods) to the WWIV source code. They would release pieces of code on how to add new features to WWIV including detailed information on how to make the change, such as: "On Line 254 in the modem.c file change modem=1 to modem=2", etc etc. This allowed anyone the ability to download WWIV, add a few lines of Mod code and change the look of WWIV to something cool looking (Because the basic wwiv software looked like ass). Eventually I became hooked on modding and learning C programming. This became the start of AXiS. AXiS was designed from the ground up to be a pirate bulletin board system to support the warez scene.

"I started with the basic WWIV source code and downloaded all the common / favorite mods out there for it. I would rewrite each mod to fit into my style of coding to make sure mods worked with each other. I would usually end up enhancing the mod and/or fixing the bugs in them. So much rewriting went into the WWIV framework that it was above and beyond what WWIV ever was. While the mod community was pretty open on how to do changes to the WWIV source there were a few bbs's that wouldn't reveal their secrets on how they did their mods. So I would spend a lot of time on other boards learning what their mod did and duplicating it. Eventually I found two people (two boards) that had the best mods out there and started trading custom th them. One kid who I shared code with created the RiP-X bbs software. He eventually changed RiP-X to QUiVER and claimed it was a forum-hack. The other was (fallen angel?) who wrote Dominion.

"We shared a lot of code and had some fun times doing it. If I ever find my old-ass floppy with AXiS 1.9c final on it i'll email you."