Waffle is a bulletin-board system (BBS) software package created by Tom Dell for the Dark Side of the Moon BBS, which ran under DOS and later UNIX. It was first publicly released in December 1989 (version 1.58), with the final stable release being version 1.65 in 1992. A beta version of 1.66 was made available on the main site but was never officially released.
Waffle was notable among DOS BBS software for several distinguishing characteristics. All of its configuration files were stored in readable plain-text files, which made the system easier to administer and customize compared to many contemporary BBS packages that used binary or proprietary configuration formats. Additionally, Waffle fully supported Usenet and UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy Protocol) on the DOS platform, a capability that was uncommon among DOS-based BBS software of the era.
The software was developed as a rewrite of the Ascii Express (AE) interface, which had been used for the Dark Side of the Moon BBS in San Jose, California. Waffle was later ported to UNIX and Xenix platforms.
A Usenet newsgroup named comp.bbs.waffle was created for discussion of the Waffle BBS system. It was also possible to link Waffle (running under DOS) to FidoNet and WWIV networks using external gateway utilities.
Waffle was particularly popular during the late 1980s and early to mid-1990s, a period often considered the golden age of bulletin board systems. A Python-based clone called Pyffle BBS, which runs on modern systems, was developed as a Waffle-compatible implementation (last updated in 2011).
