History The first version of PCBoard was released in 1983. Clark Development Company (CDC) pioneered the FILE ID.DIZ format as well as a powerful scripting language (PPL), which supported modifications and to a large degree replacement of most standard commands and processes. A compiled interpreter script written in PPL was called PPE (PCBoard Programming Executable). PPEs were generated by the PCBoard Programming Language Compiler (PPLC), which was an optional tool provided by Clark Development Company and was also available for purchase as stand alone tool. It was less than $100 by itself and less than $50 in combination with any BBS license. This allowed programmers to develop PPEs for PCBoard without having to purchase a PCBoard BBS license. Also optional and available by itself were the printed PCBoard manual and the printed PPLC reference handbook. The script language was introduced with version 15.0 and made this version of PCBoard even more successful than PCBoard V14.5. Various door programs were in use, including Sam Smith's Prodoor, which added a full screen editor and other features which were later included in PCBoard itself. The script language PPL and PPE's which became more and more available, increased the popularity of PCBoard and emerged by the mid nineties as the de facto-standard BBS system for warez BBS on the IBM PC. The warez BBS's used mostly pirated versions of the BBS software and thus did not appear in any official sales or usage statistic for the software. What PCBoard was for warez BBSes on the IBM PC, was Amiexpress for BBSes running on Commodore Amiga computers. Despite the high price tag Clark Development Company sold more than 50,000 PCBoard licenses by 1995. The last full release of PCBoard by Clark Development Company was version 15.3 in September 1996. Clark Technologies, a division of Clark Development Company announced on July 29, 1996 the availability of source code and OEM licenses for the PCBoard BBS software. The final release was 15.4 beta, which had a one-month trial period. Later, the lead software engineer from Clark Development Company released information on how to bypass the trial period timeout; the timeout had been inserted as a reminder and had not been intended to permanently disable the software. Clark Development Company went bankrupt in July 1997 and closed its offices without prior warning, leaving a great number of upset customers behind. Customers were never notified by the company, and