FEDWORLD GATEWAY BBS
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The Federal Government has overall made excellent use of BBS technology and
there are nearly a hundred federal government bulletin boards operating
publicly today with many more private systems used for various internal
purposes. In the past, our experience with the operators of government
bulletin boards has been almost universally positive. Most of the operators
have been internal advocates of bulletin boards and persuaded their
departments to put them up for the benefit of the public and to aid in the
public information mission most governmental departments have.

The National Technical Information Service (NTIS, not to be confused with the
National Institute for Technology and Science - NIST) is dedicated to
assisting private businesses with technical information to make them more
competitive worldwide.

Despite current efforts to put all government online services under the
Government Printing Office with the GPO WINDO program, NTIS has decided to do
it's own system. They call it FedWorld Gateway. It operates at (703)321-8020
using the MAJOR BBS software. Tom Walker is project director and Ken Royer
operates the system. Hosted on a 50MHz 80486 computer with two 1.2 GB drives,
the system currently sports a total of 46 9600bps access lines.

The system provides a wealth of information regarding a wide variety of
government topics. I previously worked in the Defense industry and for a good
bit of that time in Logistics - producing technical manuals primarily. The
system sported a fairly huge file area of military specifications and we were
surprised to find a copy of MIL-M-38784 available for download. This is a
essentially a government style book for writing technical manuals. There were
dozens of other milspecs available as well.

We also found a large library of information about CALS - the Contractor
Automated Logistics System - this is actually an entire system defining the
way contractors maintain logistics data, including manuals, but also part
information, provisioning, etc. in a common data format.

We were even surprised to find a library of satellite GIF images of earth and
North America.

But the forte of the FedWorld Gateway system is the gateway. MAJOR BBS offers
a fairly unique function among BBS software products. It has the ability to
outdial to other BBS systems. You can dial IN on one line and use a second
line to dial OUT to another system somewhere else. Some chat services use
this feature to "link" systems from different cities to form impromptu
national chat "parties." FedWorld uses it a bit differently. Bob Bunge has
tracked down some 91 federal bulletin board systems and put them all on a
single massive menu. You can pick one of these systems, and the service
automatically dials OUT and connects you to that government BBS. The systems
are located all over the country. And the economic sense of dialing long
distance IN to FedWorld - which in turn dials long distance OUT to the other
bulletin boards, is a bit dubious. But the concept of putting all government
bulletin boards and online services on one accessible menu is inspired.

Despite Bunge's investment of some 300 hours of effort in tracking down all
these bulletin boards, he's graciously allowed us to reproduce the list -
with direct access telephone numbers. But the FedWorld Gateway service may be
the best effort yet at bringing the increasing number of federal online
information services under one access point. National Technical Information
Service, 5285 Port Royal Road, Springfield, VA 22161; (703)487-4850 voice;
(703)487-4650 voice mail; (703)321-8020 BBS.