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[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 tto 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.
