After the deletion of the Dutch> forum on ISCABBS in april 1995, a group of four dutchmen decided that the dutch online community needed a place of its own to hang out and chat. They set out to create their own BBS system and asked KHaglund, the writer of YAWC for a copy of his BBS code.

Two weeks after sending their request they received an email with a copy of this code attached. Now they set out to find a computer to do testruns on. They chose to illegaly install Linux on a computerlab computer and run their BBS on this machine. After some fiddling in C they managed to get their system up and running and named it HAL 9000 BBS.

Although the BBS was in a test-phase, it rapidly became so popular that the machine got overloaded and a limit of 25 users had to be installed. In the mean time work on the system continued, until most of the main bugs had been fixed. After that it was decided to move the BBS to Marsares' computer, because the computerlab was accidentally switched off by someone wanting to do some typing every few days. There would also be an announcement that the BBS would be officially open then.

Here is the original announcement, which was placed on the HAL 9000 WWW Server:

> Yes, it's finally happened! The HAL9000-BBS is here! At the moment it's only a test-bbs, but it should be up quite a lot. We're working on it very hard and if all's well we should have the final version running within 2 weeks. This will be the coolest bbs in the world, bet on it! We have arranged a computer that is connected to the net directly and that will be up 24 hours a day. Sysops will be:

> Marsares (owner)
> Kirth (wizard)
> Fatal Error (wizard & cool)
> Cafuego (wizard & cool)

> All of us hope to see you online soon!

And after these two weeks the BBS was moved to another computer, so it would be protected from the hands of those who seek to do word-processing. Then, another BBS, also named HAL 9000, was discovered and after an exchange of emails between its admin and those of the young BBS it was decided that a new name had to be chosen for the BBS.

To involve the users in the process of a name-change everyone was encouraged to send in their ideas, which could then be voted on. As always, however, the best idea came in after the voting had been done, so all that fuss was in vain.

Monolith BBS came into existence on june 28 1995 and is exactly a year old as this is being written. In this year over 8000 people have connected to the BBS and 2631 of them have decided to stay. A sponsor was found who generously donated a machine that could be dedicated to the BBS and many changes were made to its code. This results in a system that can hold up to 100 users simultaneously and that is nearly bug-free.