The Story of M&M BBS and M&M Term for Commodore 64
The Forgotten BBS That Shouldn’t Be Forgotten: The Story of M&M BBS, M&M Term, and the Graphics Systems That Powered Them
A Commodore 64 Communications Appliance Decades Ahead of Its Time
In the mid‑1980s, long before the internet or embedded systems, a small business in Louisiana quietly ran one of the most technically advanced bulletin board systems ever built on a Commodore 64. It wasn’t a commercial package. It wasn’t a clone of CNet, Ivory, or Color 64. It was a custom‑engineered system called M&M BBS, designed to run unattended, crash‑proof, and remotely.
Today, only one piece of that ecosystem survives online: M&M Term, the companion terminal program. It represents only a fraction of the full system that once existed.
A BBS Built Like an Appliance
M&M BBS ran hidden inside a cabinet, powered through a latching relay. If the power went out, the system stayed off until manually restarted. This prevented:
- Half‑boots
- Disk corruption
- The modem staying off‑hook
- The BBS sitting at a READY prompt
This was industrial‑grade design on a home computer.
Crash‑Proof by Design
The system used a patched BASIC warm‑start vector. If the BBS ever hit an error—syntax, overflow, illegal quantity—it never dropped to READY. Instead, it restarted instantly, reinitialized the modem, and dropped the caller.
This made the board effectively uncrashable.
A Database Engine Inside a 1541
M&M BBS used the 1541’s REL files as a true database:
- Direct record access
- Instant login
- No scanning
- No RAM overhead
Messages were stored as individual SEQ files, preventing corruption and making transfers modular.
Rainbow transfer Integration
The BBS used Rainbow, obtained directly from its creator on QuantumLink. This allowed:
- Multi‑file transfers
- Database syncing of .rel files
- Terminal‑to‑BBS data exchange
This was far beyond what most BBSes could do.
A Fake Clock Before Raspberry Pi Invented One
The BBS saved a timestamp at every logoff. On restart, it:
- Loaded the saved time
- Calculated elapsed time
- Reconstructed the current time
This is the same concept used today in the Raspberry Pi’s fake‑hwclock.
Yes M&M BBS invented the fake hardware clock on c64 in the 80s
Support for Both Early and Hayes Modems
Early 300‑baud modems had no AT commands. They were controlled with POKEs to the CIA chip—just like GPIO pins on a Raspberry Pi.
M&M BBS supported:
- Bit‑banged 300‑baud modems
- Hayes AT modems
- Automatic detection
- Automatic hangup
This dual‑driver system was extremely rare.
Color Plotter Logs
The BBS supported both dot‑matrix printers and pen plotters. Plotters allowed:
- Color‑coded logs
- Red for errors
- Blue/green for system events
- Black for normal activity
This created a visual diagnostic timeline—something no other C64 BBS is known to have done.
Blipverts: A Proto‑Twitter Feature
At logoff, users could leave an 80‑character “Blipvert” for the next caller.
A micro‑status update system decades before Twitter.
The Terminal Ecosystem: M&M Term and CBTerm RLE
M&M Term — The Official Companion Terminal commodore.software/downloads
M&M Term (archived online today) provided:
- PETSCII color
- Commodore‑style menus
- Rainbow Punter transfers
- A fast, clean interface
It also sent an identifier string on connect, allowing the BBS to automatically switch into full Commodore color mode.
This was capability negotiation long before Telnet or SSH.
CBTerm + RLE — The Advanced Graphics Option
The BBS also supported CBTerm with RLE graphics, a shareware terminal that included:
- A full RLE vector‑graphics editor
- Object‑based drawing
- Color vector screens
- Downloadable graphics menus
Unlike M&M Term, RLE mode could not be autodetected, so the BBS offered it as a manual option at logon.
This created three menu systems:
- ANSI
- PETSCII
- RLE vector graphics (CBTerm)
M&M BBS was one of the only C64 BBSes to support all three.
Why This System Matters
M&M BBS wasn’t just a BBS. It was:
- A database engine
- A scheduler
- A watchdog system
- A remote‑controlled appliance
- A dual‑mode modem driver
- A color‑coded logging system
- A proto‑social network
- A custom terminal ecosystem
- A multi‑format display engine
- A self‑healing embedded system
All built on a 1 MHz 6502 with 64 KB of RAM.
If the original printout and disks still exist, they represent a lost piece of computing history.
