BBS: /B-B-S/ n. [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 groups. 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.
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