Farewell Enter BBS

At its inauguration on July 4, 1990, Enter BBS (the NIH Centralized Bulletin Board System) was the first electronic bulletin board system from the NIH Computer Center. The system allowed users access to bulletin boards 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Enter BBS also enabled users to create and administer their own bulletin boards—a novel idea at the time, when bulletin boards were individual dialup services controlled and moderated by their owners.

Enter BBS filled an important niche. Remember this was four or five years before the first real growth of the World Wide Web. From its introduction in 1990, Enter BBS quickly became a popular mechanism for sharing information with researchers, administrators, teachers, and students throughout NIH and the nation. Almost 140,000 people around the world have used the BBS system—60,000 of them public users. Within four years the BBS system had been honored with two NIH Director’s Awards, and the number of different bulletin boards totaled 76.