Internet

The Internet is a global system of computer networks which are interconnected to form the world's largest computer network. The Internet has roots in the 1960's United States Department of Defense ARPANET project. After the establishment of ARPANET in 1969, universities and educational institutions began joining the network from 1970 on, and several of the large information networks adopted the TCP/IP network stack and merged to form "the Internet" around the early 1980's. Throughout the 80's, the Internet grew steadily but after it was opened for commercial interest in the early 1990's, it experienced the beginning of rapid growth which continues to this day. Currently the most popular services provided over the Internet are the World Wide Web, an interlaced structure of documents connected by hyperlinks, and email, which lets people send and receive electronic mail quickly and conveniently. The Internet has no central governing body, which makes it famous for being the world's biggest arena for free speech.

The Internet and boylove

The Internet has become extremely important to the boylove community in the past decade because of the opportunity for freedom of association. This has given room for many boylove communities, including but not limited to the following:

• Usenet's alt.fan.teen-idols and alt.support.boy-lovers
• IRC's #afti, #bl, and #blsupport
• Acolyte's Free Spirits FTP photo archive
• The first boylove-focused websites such as the European Boy Love Homepage and Kasper's Free Spirits sites
• The subsequent creation of the first Web-based BL message board, BoyChat
• The BL-related site index BoyLinks
• The various related personal and community websites
• The free BL webhosting services FPC and Dare To Speak, and even
• BoyWiki
• LifeLine, a chat room designed to support depressed or suicidal childlovers

Such communities have allowed boylovers to avoid living in isolation and have given them the opportunity to have daily contact and discuss boylove-related issues with thousands of other boylovers in dozens of languages.

BBS

A BBS, short for Bulletin Board System, was a popular way of meeting people online before the advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Today, web-based message boards have largely replaced traditional BBSs.

It may be argued that many online community sites in reality are BBSs, and that only the implementation has changed. In any case, web-based message boards are still occasionally referred to as "BBSs", or "BBS-style fora".

A BBS usually provided services such as

• topical discussion groups
• e-mail
• real-time chat with other logged-on users
• file repository for upload and download
• Internet access (gopher, IRC, and e-mail)

Technically, a BBS usually was server software running on a computer connected to one or more phone lines through a modem. The administrators of a board are called sysops, short for system operators. Since users would maintain a constant connection to the service, the number of phone lines available determined the number of users able to log on at any one time. For instance, if two phone lines were available, at most three users could be logged on (the sysop and two dialed up). For this reason, boards often enforced rules such as a maximum login time of one hour.

Unlike today's Internet, users of BBSs were more or less confined to their home board. Messages could only be read by and files only shared with users of the same board. One could only chat with users logged on to the same board, and most people could only log on to one board at a time. This confinement is likely an important factor in their decline after the Internet became publically and popularly available. However, Internet access started becoming available through BBSs a few years before direct connections to Internet service providers became publically accessible.

See also

• Internet pornography
• Online boylove community

External links

• Internet on Wikipedia - overview of the current-day Internet.
• History of the Internet on Wikipedia - focusing on the Internet's development.