[4] It grew over the next few years to become one of the first really large BBS systems, which allowed its users to carry on conversations with thousands of local residents.
[4] At the time the average BBS system was run on a single 300 or 1200 baud modem and had extremely limited storage space for messages or files (hard drives were not yet common).
At the other end of the scale, larger online services offered thousands of files and messages, but at a fairly high per-hour cost.
CRS offered a practical middle ground between the expensive mainframe systems and the local BBS, both in terms of pricing and features.
CRS's file area remained its major draw, with a library hosted on a number of networked servers that no small BBS could hope to match.
Their aggressive growth was also expensive, and forced the company into receivership in August 1990, with a sizable debt primarily owed to Bell Canada.