than storage dumps for software, where users
"download" and "upload" programs, but interact among themselves little
if at all.

Boards can be grouped by their ease of access. Some boards are
entirely public. Others are private and restricted only to personal
friends of the sysop. Some boards divide users by status. On these
boards, some users, especially beginners, strangers or children, will
be restricted to general topics, and perhaps forbidden to post.
Favored users, though, are granted the ability to post as they please,
and to stay "on-line" as long as they like, even to the disadvantage of
other people trying to call in. High-status users can be given access
to hidden areas in the board, such as off-color topics, private
discussions, and/or valuable software. Favored users may even become
"remote sysops" with the power to take remote control of the board
through their own home computers. Quite often "remote sysops" end up
doing all the work and taking formal control of the enterprise, despite
the fact that it's physically located in someone else's house.
Sometimes several "co-sysops" share power.

And boards can also be grouped by size. Massive, nationwide commercial
networks, such as CompuServe, Delphi, GEnie and Prodigy, are run on
mainframe computers and are generally not considered "boards," though
they share many of their characteristics, such as electronic mail,
discussion topics, libraries of software, and persistent and growing
problems with civil-liberties issues. Some private boards have as many
as thirty phone-lines and quite sophisticated hardware. And then there
are tiny boards.

Boards vary in popularity. Some boards are huge and crowded, where
users must claw their way in against a constant busy-signal. Others
are huge and empty--there are few things sadder than a formerly
flourishing board where no one posts any longer, and the dead
conversations of vanished users lie about gathering digital dust. Some
boards are tiny and intimate, their telephone numbers intentionally
kept confidential so that only a small number can log on.

And some boards are UNDERGROUND.

Boards can be mysterious entities. The activities of their users can
be hard to differentiate from conspiracy. Sometimes they ARE
conspiracies. Boards have harbored, or have been accused of harboring,
all manner of fringe groups, and have abetted, or been accused of
abetting, every manner of frowned-upon, sleazy, radica