The New Hacker's Dictionary

2. At CMU and other colleges with similar facilities, refers to campus-wide electronic bulletin boards.

3. The term 'physical bboard' is sometimes used to refer to an old-fashioned, non-electronic cork-and-thumbtack memo board. At CMU, it refers to a particular one outside the CS Lounge.

In either of senses 1 or 2, the term is usually prefixed by the name of the intended board ('the Moonlight Casino bboard' or 'market bboard'); however, if the context is clear, the better-read bboards may be referred to by name alone, as in (at CMU) "Don't post for-sale ads on general".

BBS /B-B-S/ n.

[common; abbreviation, 'Bulletin Board System'] An electronic bulletin board system; that is, a message database where people can log in and leave broadcast messages for others grouped (typically) into topic groups. The term was especially applied to the thousands of local BBS systems that operated during the pre-Internet microcomputer era of roughly 1980 to 1995, typically run by amateurs for fun out of their homes on MS-DOS boxes with a single modem line each. Fans of Usenet and Internet or the big commercial timesharing bboards such as CompuServe and GEnie tended to consider local BBSes the low-rent district of the hacker culture, but they served a valuable function by knitting together lots of hackers and users in the personal-micro world who would otherwise have been unable to exchange code at all. Post-Internet, BBSs are likely to be local newsgroups on an ISP; efficiency has increased but a certain flavor has been lost. See also bboard.

BCPL // n.

[abbreviation, 'Basic Combined Programming Language') A programming language developed by Martin Richards in Cambridge in 1967. It is remarkable for its rich syntax, small size of compiler (it can be run in 16k) and extreme portability. It reached break-even point at a very early stage, and was the language in which the original hello world program was written. It has been ported to so many different systems that its creator confesses to having lost count. It has only one data type (a machine word) which can be used as an integer, a character, a floating point number, a pointer, or almost anything else, depending on context. BCPL was a precursor of C, which inherited some of its features.

beam // vt.

[from Star Trek Classic's "Beam me up, Scotty!"]

1. To transfer softcopy of a file electronically; most often in combining forms such as 'beam me a copy' or 'beam that over to his site'.

2. Palm Pilot users very commonly use this term for the act of exchanging bits via the infrared links on their machines (this term seems to have originated with the ill-fated Newton Message Pad). Compare blast, snarf, BLT.