Bulletin Board Systems

In addition to the Internet and the large commercial services, there are private bulletin board systems (BBSs) dedicated to discussions and distributions of information for specific hardware platforms (e.g., PC, Macintosh, or Amiga), corporations (e.g., Adobe, Apple), and software products (e.g., CorelDraw!). Some estimates put the total number of BBSs at as many as 60,000. The largest amount of traffic in these BBSs is in files, but the FidoNet, RIME, and ILink networks provide conferences of services akin to the Internet newsgroups described in Appendix A, Graphics Files and Resources on the Internet, or the CompuServe and AOL conferences described earlier in this appendix.

Here is a sampling of private BBSs of special interest to graphics programmers; for each, the network technology (e.g., Fido) is specified.



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