Most of the Italian comes from the names of characters in the Commedia Dell'Arte which it the precursor to just about every form of humor with which we in the West are familiar such as Vaudeville, Slapstick, Circus, Parades, Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp, The Marx Brothers, etc ...

The BBS is a member of a strange group of softwares known as 'room-based' systems, specifically, the Citadel variety.

One of the first boards that I remember was an old Idea-Tree in Vancouver, Washington. I had no idea later that I'd end up in the twisted soap opera of the Citadel community in Seattle, but here I am.

Much like how the limitations of poetry are the strengths of the form, Citadel boards are generally minimalistic, text-based systems. The limitation of the medium is what keeps the experience more focused.

The most interesting thing about Citadel boards is the crazy weave of language. There's puns and satire and word games on Citadel boards that seem far more common than any other platform I've used. It's a Vaudeville of a literary kind where the audience becomes part of the stage business.

Now, if you've been here before and come back you'll have noticed the conspicuous absence of my board from the land of living things. This would be, technically speaking, because it's toast. I keep thinking about reviving it, but let's be honest: no one called it. Excepting for a few die-hard modem users with whom I don't even communicate anymore, no one probably even remembers it.

Why put it back up? Perhaps, perhaps ... some day ... but not today.

I'm pretty sure that the successor to the citadel is really the wiki, anyway, if one were to extend the ideals of the citadel to an Internet-based system. The other option, it seems to me, would be a front-end to an IMAP server, with shared name-spaces. But, really, the wiki seems the next logic step in the evolution of citadel.