Many Christians stay on the alert for new avenues of
evangelism. One increasingly popular means for this is the
computer Bulletin Board System, or BBS.
In 1978, there was only one BBS in the world. There are now
close to 90,000, serving about 20 million users. A BBS is basically
a computer hooked up to a telephone line, giving callers access to
electronic mail, games, computer programs, documents, and other
types of data. Its name comes from the cork bulletin boards we're
all familiar with, where notices are posted for passersby to see.
Similarly, most BBS's offer _message areas_ -- usually categorized
by wide-ranging topics such as "For Sale," "dBASE," "Biogenesis" or
"Reincarnation" -- where one's messages can be seen by others who
may reply privately or publicly.
BBS's represent an alternative to commercial information
providers such as America Online, CompuServe, Delphi, GEnie, and
Prodigy. These commercial services run on distributed mainframe
systems costing millions of dollars. They can accommodate thousands
of users simultaneously, book airline reservations, and offer many
special data retrieval services. However, the cost can be high: at
their _cheapest_ rates, annual charges (10 hours of connect time
per month) will run from $240 (Delphi) to $590 (CompuServe).
In contrast, most BBS's run on personal computers out of the
owner's home. They normally accommodate only a few users
simultaneously and mainly focus on two things: message bases and
file downloads. (A "download" involves a transfer of a file from
the BBS computer to your computer.) Thus, the annual cost of
calling a BBS is much less than that of using a commercial system.
Indeed, many BBS's give callers unlimited access to their services
for _free._
*_Getting Connected._* To dial a BBS, you need a computer and
a modem. Happily, the computer you use does _not_ need to be
compatible with the BBS. Macintosh users can connect with MS-DOS
BBS's, and vice versa. A modem (from _mo_dulator/_dem_odulator) is
a device that modulates or translates the digital codes used by the
computer into analog (wave-like) tones for the phone lines, and
back again....
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