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The bulletin board originally started out as strips of paper posted up in the supermaket (this type of bulletin board is still in widespread use today). Later, when computers became more widespread at home (late 1970s/early 1980s), the bulletin board system (BBS) took off. A BBS was a computer that accepted incoming calls with its modem, and enabled callers to exchange electronic messages. The very first BBS provided no other functionality. Later on, BBSes would support file uploads and downloads (via the XMODEM protocol at first, and later on the ZMODEM protocol), "door" games, real-time chat with the system operator (SysOp), real-time chat with other users if multiple phone lines were installed, and Netmail, which was transferred daily over a global, modem-based network called FidoNet, which mimicked UUCP, and even improved upon it. (FidoNet still exists today, while UUCPNET does not.) Some BBSes provided a service called Echomail, which was very much like UseNet. Echomail was built on top of Netmail.

BBSes once played the role that the InterNet does today, in an age when there was no such thing as the World Wide Web, and the InterNet was still a government research project. BBSes were text-based. Connecting to them was like logging into Linux in text mode. After you got past the login prompt, the BBS would send a menu over the phone line. You would respond by typing a letter or number from the menu. For example, if the menu said E)mail, you would type "e" to send e-mail.

An entire industry rose, based on selling software for running BBSes. Some of these programs evolved into ISPs in a box and are still being sold today. Others, like the popular Renegade BBS, have gone in the Open Source direction.

SysOps? tried to spruce up the plain text interface by adding color. For those who had color monitors, BBSes looked like those lighted, colored pegboards that they sold to kids during the same era.

BBSes ran mostly on single-tasking operating systems. A whole computer had to be dedicated to a BBS, because computers available to consumers could not run more than one application at a time.

BBSes and FidoNet still exist today. Some of today's BBSes run on modern computers under Linux.

Lots of people involved with Linux (and the WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup) are old BBS people. The Linux kernel itself was originally distributed by uploading it to a BBS. Here are some people involved with WLUG started out in the HamiltonBulletinBoardScene.

Feel free to add your name to the list.