1. A computerized meeting and announcement system that allows people to carry on discussions, upload and download files, and make announcements without the people being connected to the computer at the same time. In the early 1990's there were many thousands (millions?) of BBS?s around the world, most are very small, running on a single IBM clone PC with 1 or 2 phone lines. Some are very large and the line between a BBS and a system like AOL gets crossed at some point, but it is not clearly drawn. From Matisse

2. Electronic BBSs formed much of the the core "cyberspace" in the 1980s. Telecommunication costs were high, so rather than interconnected via "always-on" connections, such systems transfered files and messages as irregular intervals over dial-up lines. Mail was transported through BBS via protocols like FidoNet and UUCP. Files would move themselves from system to system as users would download from one BBS and upload to others. Many of today's older hackers were active in the BBS community of the 1980s. From Hacking-Lexicon