The Serial Port was shut down - Atomwide re-designed the hardware of the two port serial card (which became their 3 port) and sold this for many years afterwards, they also sold ARCterm for a while.

ARCbbs was slightly too high support for anyone to take on, and dialup BBSes had lost their shine by that point anyway, what with that new fangled internet thing. I can't remember what happened with Investigator, I think he didn't do any more versions and it sort of petered out (either that or he started selling it himself - it was so long ago I really can't remember any more!).

I really ought to find a monitor that'll work on my A540 and try turning it on again. It's got a 10bT network on it, it could come to the US and run on my broadband connection... ideally I'd find an emulator for linux/osx and just run the whole machine under emulation, though that would require emulating a serial port and hooking it to a telnet server

Hugo