WorldGroup BBS was a
BBS system developed by
Galacticomm around
1995. It was nothing more than a graphical
front end added to their best selling product
MajorBBS that allowed Windows users to navigate the BBS in a graphical fashion. It was quite powerful for what was around at the time, and by far less expensive than Mac-based
FirstClass or
Wildcat! BBS, that were the alternatives at the time.
WorldGroup was quite powerful, but it was a completely closed system where every stupid add-on with any functionality cost over $99, and its licence was quite limitative. One amazing thing was the server software: it run in DOS using a DOS extender and featured a custom operating system with DLLs with which, by using a simple Pentium-class machine with 16Mb RAM and intelligent serial circuitry, you could handle neary one hundred simultaneous user sessions!
Being used to the openness of the Fidonet world, WorldGroup was very hard to customize and modify (its own custom pages had an awful editor and were not compatible with anything), and importing Fidonet mail required a complex array of C programs and PERL scripts to work.
Though being quite powerful (it included mail, conferences and e-mail with offline reader, a file sharing area, instant messanging, graphical teleconference with whiteboard, user profiles and more) it did not encounter so much success, and so Galacticomm went belly up after releasing a web-based version (v3.0) circa 1998.