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.
On most web browsers you can double click any word on this page to see what definitions I have for that word.
This dictionary server is not an authoratative source of information for anything. Like almost everything at sorabji.com, I set this up for my own purposes. In this case the purpose is to
browse words and ideas at random. An automatically generated page that produces 1000 Random Words
is my gateway to this resource. I also attempt a word of the day project,
in which I attempt to write something about myself starting with interesting words that I find through the Wordswarm Random Words Pages. I have made
available the complete 1828 Webster's Dictionary, which many feel is the greatest English dictionary ever published.
Other random links of mine include the Sorabji.com Random Link, which sends you to one of
over 7,000 pages on my web sites; the Face Server produces random images of
human faces; clicking the Random WAYD link shows you a random posting to my "What Are You Doing?" board; the Random USPS
Mailbox link sends you to a page with information about a random mailbox; and the random pictures page page of sorabji.com shows one of over 11,000 random images any time you load the page. On an unrelated note, I have begun making several thousand pages of legal documents searchable.
