Goldstein
and his magazine were peevishly thriving.

Instead, the Crackdown of 1990 would concern itself with the
computerized version of forbidden data. The crackdown itself, first
and foremost, was about BULLETIN BOARD SYSTEMS. Bulletin Board
Systems, most often known by the ugly and un-pluralizable acronym
"BBS," are the life-blood of the digital underground. Boards were also
central to law enforcement's tactics and strategy in the Hacker
Crackdown.

A "bulletin board system" can be formally defined as a computer which
serves as an information and message-passing center for users
dialing-up over the phone-lines through the use of modems. A "modem,"
or modulator-demodulator, is a device which translates the digital
impulses of computers into audible analog telephone signals, and vice
versa. Modems connect computers to phones and thus to each other.

Large-scale mainframe computers have been connected since the 1960s,
but PERSONAL computers, run by individuals out of their homes, were
first networked in the late 1970s. The "board" created by Ward
Christensen and Randy Suess in February 1978, in Chicago, Illinois, is
generally regarded as the first personal-computer bulletin board system
worthy of the name.

Boards run on many different machines, employing many different kinds
of software. Early boards were crude and buggy, and their managers,
known as "system operators" or "sysops," were hard-working technical
experts who wrote their own software. But like most everything else in
the world of electronics, boards became faster, cheaper,
better-designed, and generally far more sophisticated throughout the
1980s. They also moved swiftly out of the hands of pioneers and into
those of the general public. By 1985 there were something in the
neighborhood of 4,000 boards in America. By 1990 it was calculated,
vaguely, that there were about 30,000 boards in the US, with uncounted
thousands overseas.

Computer bulletin boards are unregulated enterprises. Running a board
is a rough-and-ready, catch-as-catch-can proposition. Basically,
anybody with a computer, modem, software and a phone-line can start a
board. With second-hand equipment and public-domain free software, the
price of a board might be quite small--less than it would take to
publish a magazine or even a decent pamphlet. Entrepreneurs eagerly
sell bulletin-board software, and will coach nontechnical amateur
sysops in its use.

Boards are not