Renegade (BBS)
Renegade is a freeware bulletin board system (BBS) written for IBM PC-compatible computers running MS-DOS that gained popularity among hobbyist BBSes in the early to mid 1990s. It was originally written by Cott Lang in Turbo Pascal, optimized with assembly language, based on the source code of Telegard, which was in turn based on the earlier WWIV.
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| Developer(s) | Cott Lang, Patrick Spence, Gary Hall, Jeff Herrings, T.J. McMillen, Chris Hoppman, Lee Palmer, Rick Parrish |
|---|---|
| Initial release | June 1991 |
| Stable release | 1.22/DOS
/ October 10, 2020 |
| Written in | Turbo Pascal |
| Operating system | DOS |
| Type | Bulletin Board System |
| Website | www |
Transfer of control
On April 23, 1997, after the decline of BBS popularity, Lang ceased development work on Renegade and passed it on to two Renegade BBS utility authors: Patrick Spence and Gary Hall. Spence and Hall maintained Renegade for three years, releasing three updates with their new, ordinal date version scheme.
Jeff Herrings, another former third-party software developer, was handed the source by Spence in January 2000 after offering help when he found there was no Y2K-compliant version of the software. Herrings released a public alpha version of Renegade in March 2000 addressing Y2K-compliance problems. He stepped down as active programmer in October 2001 citing lack of time and desire.
Spence eventually handed the program over to Corey Snow in 2002, who intended to release an open-source, Java-based clone of the software which never saw the light of day.
T.J. McMillen received the source code in October 2003 from Patrick Spence in a plea to have some much needed features added to Renegade. McMillen then added the help of Chris Hoppman, one of the few remaining Renegade BBS operators around. Together they released a few updates which addressed bugs and debuted some new features before Hoppman lost interest. Hoppman stepped down from the project in 2004 and is no longer involved. This left McMillen, once again, alone to carry on the Renegade code.
Herrings released his Y2K-compliant source code to the public via the Dreamland BBS in September 2005 citing he believed it was right to share a software he deemed mostly abandoned in hopes that it would see further and more active development. He felt that due to a claimed immoral injustice by Patrick Spence, he was no longer under a moral sense to oblige a previous agreement not to release the source code.[1]
With little free time, Renegade idled for more than a year until April 2006 when McMillen (also known as Exodus) added the talent of Lee Palmer to the Renegade team to replace Hoppman. Palmer (also known as Nuclear) is a former third-party software developer for the T.A.G. Bulletin Board System.
Current information
Current testing and coding is in the works on another update and some third-party utilities for the current version of Renegade. The current work is now being coded under 'The Renegade Development Team' name, which mainly includes McMillen and Palmer. The Current Alpha releases show Lightbar support hard coded into the Renegade BBS code.
Version 1.22/DOS Full Install and Upgrade versions were released on October 20, 2020. Some minor additions from the GitHub site included.
Version 1.20a/DOS and 1.20a/Win32 was released as an update on November 21, 2013 to release Win32 Builds and for some minor code updates.
Renemail v1.20a/DOS (Echomail) Processor was updated and released on October 11, 2011.
- Source code for Renegade v1.19a/DOS released as Open Source, February 4, 2013.