[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.