A BBS was a program that was run on an individual's computer that allowed people to use a Modem Terminal program on their computer to call the host's computer and read/write  messages for others to respond to, play games, download files to use onto their computer, write messages in a message base and send email. I can't explain what a BBS is any better than this.  You can look up BBS in an internet search engine and get some kind of explanation that a different person wrote.  Before the advent of the internet, calling a BBS with your computer was the only real social activity that computer "nerds" had before there was the internet. I ran a BBS for a period of time during the last 15 years of the 20th century.  So, after the internet became available, gradually people quit calling BBS's. Yeah, this was before the internet.  Really. Can you imagine 

life without the internet?  Geesh... this is the 21st century, you know...  BBS's were part of a little piece of Computing's past in the Old days of simpler and more expensive equipment. (The computers were more primitive and cost a lot more than what you paid for YOUR  computer that you are using  here to read this text.)

I will attempt to show you here on the internet how a BBS runs when the original structure of how the BBS was set up has been converted to HTML technology. That will be accomplished with the additional use of Flash and Shockwave and Javascript.

I ran a BBS on a Commodore 64 until about 1998.

To reach my BBS (Bulletin Board System), you would use a modem terminal software program and

have it have your modem dial the phone number I had the BBS running on. It would CONNECT and then it would ask you if you wanted to have color or only TEXT then, assuming you wanted color, it would have you select your color mode (was it on a Commodore computer or did you want IBM style ANSI color graphics. Then it would display a place to have you put in your LOGIN ID and your password or you would type NEW to register a new account. Then it would proceed to ask you a series of questions which would set up your account.  It would be made clear to the caller that the SysOp would keep all the information in the strictest confidence to protect the user's privacy.  If the user was a new user, as soon as the account was set up, he/she would then be required to read a mandatory text file that displayed the rules of the BBS.  Next, the caller would be given the BBS's colorful title screen. Then the BBS would show the caller anything else the SysOp  (System Operator) wanted him to see. The caller would then be taken to the BBS's main prompt.  There, the caller would be able to type in 2 or more letters to go to a certain part of the BBS. The caller could also t ype a ? question mark to get a list of the command prompts  along with an explanation of what the command prompts were about for his/her reference.