PAROLE Software

The Parole Board BBS · Clayton, NC · 1990–1997

From 1990 to 1997 — seven years to the day — Dennis Maidon ran The Parole Board BBS out of Clayton, North Carolina, and wrote a whole catalog of DOS software for it under the name PAROLE Software: trivia games, a horse-racing parlor, sysop utilities, and more. This page preserves that work and lets you experience it — watch the games run, or play them right here in your browser.

What is this?

Before the web, people dialed each other's computers. A bulletin board system (BBS) was a PC with a modem that other people called to read messages, trade files, and play games. The games were called doors — the BBS would "open a door" from its menu to a separate program that ran your session over the phone line.

Dennis Maidon wrote and sold more than two dozen of these doors and sysop tools as PAROLE Software, distributed as shareware across the BBS world in the early-to-mid 1990s. The Serial Port — a computer-history preservation project — tracked down his releases, documented them, and got them running again, with Dennis's blessing and direct help.

Watch the games run

These BBS-era programs run under DOSBox — the door games in local "sysop" mode, as a caller would have seen them in 1994. Captured here as gameplay video.

Play in your browser

No download, no install — these run in a DOS emulator (js-dos) right on the page. Click the screen to give it focus, then type. Works best on a desktop browser. Each runs in local "sysop" mode with a stand-in caller record, so you see exactly what a 1990s BBS user saw.

More of Dennis's doors, running the same way:

You can also jump straight into the trivia games above: Star Trek Trivia · Super Trivia.

Get the software

Every PAROLE Software release we've preserved — doors, utilities, and the original documentation — is available to download from the PAROLE Software file area. They run under DOSBox and period BBS software.