I wrote a lot of BBS software starting from 1986. This was in Toronto mainly on the C64 (28k RAM… plus some available via switching out ROM using assembler), so Spence BBS was an inspiration, but with a friend we wrote software called M1 which had creative features like user contributed ongoing stories and a way to display files or run simple scripts from any command, like a shell.

Eventually around 1990 it was extended to support federated message exchange, but by then UNIX systems were entering consciousness so we switched to multi-line, uucp capable Waffle software on DOS, then Xenix, BSD/OS and finally Linux around 1993 as it became https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internex_Online