WWTBAM Bored

After digging through 746 e-mail messages, I finally cleaned out my Inbox at work. About half of the messages were not important - usually they were from someone "replying to all" rather than to one individual, or were about issues that had come and gone while I was on vacation. One e-mail caught my attention, however. It was from someone that I knew back in the old BBS message board days; I hadn't heard from him in quite a few years, so we're trying to catch each other up on what's been going on in our lives.

What's a BBS message board?

(Hope I don't look really stupid asking this!)

kayrharris wrote:What's a BBS message board?

(Hope I don't look really stupid asking this!)

Back in the era of dial-up modems and before the advent of the Internet there were BBSes. BBS stood for "Bulletin Board System", taking their name from the bulletin boards that used to be up in laundromats and other places, where people could leave messages for others to pick up, read and respond. One person would volunteer to host a BBS using various software packages, and others would use their modems to call the host computer. Once connected the person could read and respond to messages online or could download them (using other software), respond and then upload the responses, with the BBS software automatically sorting out the messages and putting them into the appropriate message threads. Once the general public started using the Internet, the old BBS systems withered away, to be replaced by chat rooms and message boards like this one (which, in some respects, is very much like the old BBS system).

Thanks! Maybe I'm not stupid. I was a latecomer to the internet compared to lots of other people.