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Hermes 4 icon

Hermes 4

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The Mac-native BBS. Hermes 4 is a modern Swift rebuild of the Macintosh BBS software first released in 1989, with a pixel-perfect ANSI terminal, real-time chat, forums, file sharing, and DOS/68K door game support. Free.

Hermes 4 screenshot 1

Cost / License

  • Free
  • Proprietary

Since

  • New

Platforms

  • Online
  • Mac
  • iPhone
  • iPad
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Hermes 4 was added to AlternativeTo by Will-Price on and this page was last updated .

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What is Hermes 4?

Hermes was the most popular BBS software for the Macintosh, written in 1988 and first released publicly in 1989. Its original author reacquired it in 2024, open-sourced the v2.2 source code, and rebuilt it from scratch as Hermes 4.

Hermes 4 is two free applications. Hermes Server hosts a board on your Mac with a native sysop dashboard, forums, internet email, file areas, and Telnet/TLS/SSH/WebSocket/HTTPS connectivity. Hermes Terminal connects to any Hermes board or Telnet BBS from macOS or iOS, with a pixel-perfect ANSI/CP437 renderer, native chat panels, and file transfer progress.

It also ships a built-in ANSI art editor that draws in the same engine that renders on the board, so what you draw is byte-for-byte what callers see — with CP437, SAUCE, iCE colors, and 16/256/truecolor support. Door games run in-process through 68K and x86 emulation with DOOR32.SYS support, so classic DOS doors work on Apple Silicon without DOSBox.

Free, no registration. Requires macOS 13 or later, or iOS 26 or later.