[common; abbreviation, "Bulletin Board System"] An electronic
bulletin board system; that is, a message database where people can
log in and leave broadcast messages for others grouped (typically)
into {topic group}s. The term was especially applied to the thousands
of local BBS systems that operated during the pre-Internet
microcomputer era of roughly 1980 to 1995, typically run by amateurs
for fun out of their homes on MS-DOS boxes with a single modem line
each. Fans of Usenet and Internet or the big commercial timesharing
bboards such as CompuServe and GEnie tended to consider local BBSes
the low-rent district of the hacker culture, but they served a
valuable function by knitting together lots of hackers and users in
the personal-micro world who would otherwise have been unable to
exchange code at all. Post-Internet, BBSs are likely to be local
newsgroups on an ISP; efficiency has increased but a certain flavor
has been lost. See also {bboard}.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {bboard}{demon dialer}{distribution}{forum}{jack in}{weenie}]