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Source. The type face is Web437_IBM_VGA_9x16.woff from The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.2, dated 2020-11-21, by VileR at int10h.org, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 and rehosted from this origin with its license file alongside at /yahew-assets/forum-bbs/int10h-LICENSE.txt, which is what ShareAlike asks for. It was chosen over the alternatives because it is the only face in this folder that carries a license at all: the Perfect DOS VGA 437 font TuiCss bundles is a third party's typeface with no grant of any kind, and the MIT on that repository cannot reach it. The 9 by 16 cell is not taken on trust. The .woff was decompressed and its tables read: 1600 units per em, ascent 1200 and descent 400 which is exactly one em of line box, 289 glyphs, and a single advance width in hmtx of 900 units. 900 over 1600 is 0.5625em, which is 9.000 pixels at font-size: 16px, so width: 80ch here is 720 pixels and every rule on the page is exactly 80 characters. The cmap was checked for every character the plate draws; the only one missing from the font is U+00A4, and nothing uses it.

The sixteen colors are hardware values, not a mood. They are the EGA table from moddingwiki.shikadi.net, saved in reference/3-conversation/forum-bbs/palette/: four channel levels only, 0, 85, 170 and 255. Entry 6 is #AA5500 rather than the in-sequence #AAAA00, because IBM added circuitry to stop brown reading as mud and the in-sequence value is what a cheap clone monitor showed. Backgrounds on this plate never go above 7, because in text mode the high attribute bit was blink and not background intensity, so a bright background is something the hardware could not draw. TuiCss's numbers were deliberately not used: its blue-168 is #0000A8 where the hardware gives #0000AA, and its blue-255 is #0000FF where bright blue is #5555FF.

The banner is drawn here, and no ANSI file is shipped, quoted or traced. The .ans files in the reference folder carry no license and their artists are credited individually, so they are study material only. fuel26_us-arakboards_BBSAD.ans is a real BBS advertisement and it is where the vocabulary came from: the shades ░ ▒ ▓ █, the double box run ╔ ╗ ╚ ╝ ═ ║, and lettering built out of the half blocks ▀ and ▄. The board name is rendered from a 5 by 6 pixel alphabet declared in the plate itself and pushed through those half blocks, which is the technique and not the artwork. No escape sequence is parsed; the screens are authored as markup.

The board, its sysop and the thread are invented, and are labeled as invented on the page. No real board is recreated and no real person is impersonated. The message header layout is the artifact being documented: post count, join date and rank sitting beside the words, where you cannot read a thread without reading everyone's totals. The extended connect string CONNECT 14400/ARQ/V32/LAPM/V42BIS is the shape a Supra-family modem printed and is presented as dialect rather than as a quotation, because it could not be checked against a manual for this plate. The 55 millisecond row paint is arithmetic and not a memory: 14,400 bits a second over 8N1 is 1,440 bytes a second, which is about 18 eighty-column rows. The upload to download ratio is a number in the status row and nothing else, and the session clock ticks in real seconds, which the field marks say out loud.

The four live boards were checked on 24 August 2026, and three of them no longer do the thing this plate is about. forum.agoraroad.com runs XenForo and still prints Joined, Messages and Reaction score under every avatar, which is the BBS header intact. forum.melonland.net runs SMF 2.0.19 and its index read 55,718 posts and 3,200 members, up from the 54,856 and 3,150 in the 2 August capture in reference/; but inside a thread its markup is a rank title and five copies of star.gif with no numeral anywhere, so the count became a picture. forum.spacehey.com is live and a topic page prints only posted and a timestamp. jcink.com is live, its footer reads © 2006-2026 Jcink.com and its own page says it has held an uptime of 99% since 2006 on a modified version of Invision Power Board.

Deliberately absent. What a jcink-hosted board prints beside a username. forum.jcink.com answered HTTP 429 on 2 August and again on 24 August, three weeks apart, so the dead end recorded in SOURCES.md reproduces, and completing a bot check to get past it is off the table. Also absent: when BBSes peaked, how many there ever were, when forums overtook them, and any claim that one killed the other. None of that is in this folder. The daily time limit, the node count and the ratio are period furniture placed on an invented board, not a measurement of any real one.

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