The TAG BBS software was another clone of the early WWIV BBS Software. This was back in the days when Turbo Pascal 3.0 was "the thing" and WWIV had moved on, as it always did, and released its old source code "for the public use."
The team that wrote TAG was known as "The TAG Team" and was comprised of Victor Capton, Randy Goebel, and Robert Numerick. Eventually, they added on Paul Loeber and Paul Williams. They actually released software that seemed quite professional and did it for free. They said that they were shareware, but never did they ask for any sort of payment. Once again, amazing software.
No one ever got them to answer definitively on what their name stood for, but I have a reasonably reliable rumor that it was from The Adventurer's Guild which was a Dungeons and Dragons sort of reference. Good enough explanation for me.
I have a moderately skewed view of the TAG Software, since I did some work and ran an Alpha site for one of their hottest competitors Telegard. TAG vs Telegard wars were like any other sort of holy war and were probably started by the fact that the original author of Telegard, Carl Mueller produced some very juvenile textfiles making fun of the TAG Team. I tried hard as I could to soften some of that conflict by talking to the TAG Team as often as I could, giving them suggestions and advice, and trying to compose myself like an adult. Felt impressive at the time, as I was about 13 or 14. Felt darned important, I did.
They did have a problem with a slow update cycle and witha touch of inflexibility. They made up for it in spades with later releases, but in my opinion, Telegard was always about a quarter step ahead in some areas, a quarter step behind in a few others. (Interesting trivia tidbit: The Telegard team was the one who first released the TAG structures to the world. We figured it out from trial and error because we wanted to write a TAG->Telegard conversion program. We were nice enough to make it do Telegard->TAG as well. Eventually, Martin Pollard of the Telegard team got official thanks from the TAG team for releasing his C version of the structures.)
It appears that their software hasn't survived into the new millenium, though, as I can't find anything current. Too bad.
By the way, anyone remember this?
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/\/\/\/ [>> Welcome to <<] \/\/\/\
| /\/ ______________ ______ ___________ \/\ |
| / / / /| / /| / /\ \ \ |
| / / TTTTTTTTTTTTTT/ AAAAAA /| GGGGGGGGGGG\/| \ \ |
|/\/ /\ TT | AA|___AA /| GG | GG/ /\ \/\|
|-< < > TT | AA/ AA /| GG | _____ < > >-|
|\/\ \/ TT | AAAAAAAAAAAA | GG | / /| \/ /\/|
| \ \ TT | AA | AA | GG |__GGGGGG | / / |
| \ \ TT | AA | AA | GG/ GG | / / |
| \/\ TT/ <> AA/ AA/ <> GGGGGGGGGGG/ <> /\/ |
\/\/\/\ /\/\/\/
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