What is a BBS?
If you have not used a BBS before, BBS stands for Bulletin Board System; BBSes were popular before the internet was popular. They were dialup
systems that used modems on telephone lines to connect users' computers to the BBS. BBSes were very similar in concept to various internet sites
and services today in that they offered public messageboards where people could discuss various topics, online games people could play
(sometimes multiplayer games that users could play against or with each other), and files to download.
The online experience was text-based (no graphics), with some colors and semi-graphical characters via text providing some text-based art
capabilities (such as ASCII art and ANSI art).
People often ran BBSes on a computer in their own home for fun, and they provided a sense of local community among their users, since most users
were local to the area due to avoidance of long-distance phone charges.
Users would connect to a BBS with thir computer using a modem, which connected to a phone line and allowed their computer to dial a phone number
to connect to the BBS. External modems looked similar to this (though it varied widely depending on brand and model):
For more information on what BBSes are, you can check the following resources:
This site is a modern bulletin board system that offers the same experience via telnet, SSH, and RLogin (text-based internet connectivity
protocols), as well as this web site, FTP,
and NNTP (newsgroups).
This BBS is also available via dialup modem (1 line). The phone number is local to northwest Oregon: 1 971-910-4722