Bulletin Board System

Draft

Definition

A bulletin board system

A computer system used as an information source and forum for a particular interest group. They were widely used in the U.S. to distribute shareware and drivers and had their heyday in the 1980s and first part of the 1990s, all before the Web took off. A BBS functions somewhat like a stand-alone Web site, but without graphics. However, unlike Web access via one connection to the Internet, each BBS had its own telephone number to dial up.

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. (Jargon File)

History

The first BBs appeared very early.