It quickly grew to be one of the world's largest bulletin board systems in the 1980s and throughout the 1990s, competing with the likes of Compuserve and Prodigy.

One of the major missing features of the Exec-PC BBS was the ability to speak with other members of the service in chat rooms.

When calling into certain numbers known as "gold nodes," the BBS member was connected to an Internet shell account on servers run by IBM's VNET division.

This solution quickly proved to be slow and confusing to members, so Mahoney set up a separate division of the company that same year to provide dialup access via both shell accounts and Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP).

Unlike the BBS, ExecPC Internet provided service exclusively to individuals in Wisconsin and northern Illinois.

In December, 2005, ATX Communications sold the remaining ExecPC assets and customer base to LocalNet of Buffalo, New York, the current operators.