Editing Bulletin board system (section)

===GUIs===
[[File:More ANSI art.png|thumb|ANSI art BBS logo]]
Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was considerable experimentation with ways to develop user-friendly interfaces for BBSes. Almost every popular system used ANSI-based color menus to make reading easier on capable hardware and terminal emulators, and most also allowed cursor commands to offer command-line recall and similar features. Another common feature was the use of [[autocomplete]] to make menu navigation simpler, a feature that would not re-appear on the Web until decades later.

A number of systems also made forays into GUI-based interfaces, either using character graphics sent from the host, or using custom GUI-based terminal systems. The latter initially appeared on the [[Macintosh]] platform, where [[TeleFinder]] and [[FirstClass]] became very popular. FirstClass offered a host of features that would be difficult or impossible under a terminal-based solution, including bi-directional information flow and non-blocking operation that allowed the user to exchange files in both directions while continuing to use the message system and chat, all in separate windows. Will Price's "Hermes", released in 1988, combined a familiar PC style with Macintosh GUI interface.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Miller |first=Michael Alyn |title=HermesBBS - History |url=http://www.hermesbbs.com/about/ |access-date=2023-03-10 |website=www.hermesbbs.com}}</ref> (Hermes was already "venerable" by 1994 although the Hermes II release remained popular.<ref>{{Cite magazine |url=http://archive.org/details/boardwatch-1994-01 |title=Macintosh BBS News |language=English |date=January 1994 |last=Gram-Reefer |first=Bill |magazine=[[Boardwatch Magazine]] |quote= Since acquiring the venerable Hermes Macintosh BBS program last Spring, new owner Lloyd Woodall of Computer Classifieds has developed a major upgrade package. Programmer Robert Rebbun has added over 70 new features and enhancements to this widely used program that now supports color ANSI graphic menus in addition to ASCII menus.}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal |last=Modin |first=Jörgen |date=June 1995 |title=COOCOM: New ways of using Information Technology for buildings design and management |url=http://www.perchristiansson.com/reports/coocom1_6_1995.pdf |journal=Project SBUF 2087 |quote=The BBS system chosen was Hermes (Price F & Yount Ralph, 1991), a character-based popular billboard system running on the Mac, but accessible from any computer system with VT100 terminal emulation.}}</ref>) [[Skypix]] featured on Amiga a complete [[markup language]]. It used a standardized set of icons to indicate mouse driven commands available online and to recognize different filetypes present on BBS storage media. It was capable of transmitting data like images, audio files, and audio clips between users linked to the same BBS or off-line if the BBS was in the circuit of the FidoNet organization.

On the PC, efforts were more oriented to extensions of the original terminal concept, with the GUI being described in the information on the host. One example was the [[Remote Imaging Protocol]], essentially a picture description system, which remained relatively obscure. Probably the ultimate development of this style of operation was the dynamic page implementation of the [[University of Southern California]] BBS (USCBBS) by Susan Biddlecomb, which predated the implementation of the [[HTML]] [[Dynamic web page]]. A complete Dynamic web page implementation was accomplished using [[The Bread Board System|TBBS]] with a [[TDBS]] add-on presenting a complete menu system individually customized for each user.