I have been using FBB amateur radio software since the early nineties. It was the time of the DOS operating system, so most of us, system administrators (or, so called system operators - sysop's), used various packet radio server software for DOS. Versions of FBB packet radio BBS server software for DOS, today are known as "DosFBB".
I still administer one DosFBB database in the SRV (Amateur Radio Union of Vojvodina, a part of SRJ). It is DosFBB v7.00g23 that runs on a 486DX computer with 16 MB of RAM and a Hercules b/w graphics. Since December 1999, it has run without any re-boot (excepting some power failures). Before that, it was a bit tricky to set up all the memory management properly, in order to avoid a "frozen" system. Although this server runs under DOS, its "radio clients" don't depend on that. In fact, users of the DosFBB might run their client software under DOS, Windows, Linux or any other operating system that offers amateur packet radio abilities.
I have also used DosFBB v5.15c on a 286/12 box at home. Five years ago, when I got a better box, a Pentium I at 166 MHz with 32 MB of RAM and VGA color graphics, I switched to a Windows version of FBB ("WinFBB"). The author of the software, a radio amateur from France, Jean-Paul F6FBB, has made many versions of WinFBB, including a 16 bit variant for Windows 3.x and Windows 9x as well as a 32 bit variant for Windows NT. I have run both variants until now (at the moment I am using 16 bit WinFBB v7.00g25 and it runs great under Windows NT 4.0).
Update: In late 1999, I upgraded my system to a Celeron 400 MHz, added 64 MB of RAM and switched to a bigger hard disk that will have enough room to install Linux and try LinFBB ...
Update: Since Spring 2001, I run WinFBB v7.00i (17 March 2001) under Windows 2000 Professional.
The main difference between DosFBB and WinFBB is that the second one allows you to do other jobs with your computer, while FBB is running as just any other application. Besides that, it is always nice to copy some text from another application (for example, from an Internet email) and to paste it into a packet radio message, or vice versa.
Update: In July 2001, I added 128 MB of RAM so my home system is very confortable now.
Update: In july 2006, (by gw3tmh) It is now many years since the FBB software was written, and during that time operating systems have moved on and many changes have been made.
It is now not possible to run any of the versions of FBB that remain on the official FBB site of www.f6fbb.org under the latest Linux Kernel (2.6 at the time of writing) but fortunately the source code for the daemon version is on the FBB web site and can be easily adapted to run under kernel 2.6 and this HOW-TO will explain the process.