Forum hack

Forum-PC was a popular BBS-hosting program for the [IBM PC] by Kenneth J. Duda. Ken Sallot explains how it became widely used as seed stock for other BBS programs: "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 i/o redirection -- Ken had worked up a hook to allow all output to go directly to both the local console and over the modem simultaneously while using a simple 'writeln' statement; this made it incredibly easy to develop features in Forum and its progeny."

Direct successors hacking on the Forum source code include BRAND-X, Emulex, LSD (Lush Software Designs), Monarch, TCS, and USSR. Further downstream programs (hacks of the hacks) included [Celerity] (from TCS), [Vision]* (including Vision/2 and Vision-X) and [Oblivion]* (from LSD). The grand era of Forum hacks was circa 1990-1994, though there were still a few of them kicking around after that point.

The interesting thing about programs that share source code is that bugs in one sometimes persist in others, so there were exploits common to the entire general family of Forum hacks.

[Telegard] is remembered by some as a Forum hack (as is [Renegade], itself based on Telegard), but it seems it was instead actually based on [WWIV] 3 source code (again, Pascal.)