The Common Link

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TCL, The Common Link, was a Swedish BBS system developed by Ulf Hedlund in the late 1980s. It was based on the capabilities of the KOM conferencing system used at many Swedish universities, and distinguished itself from the other major FidoNet BBS systems at the time by its support for topic threading and its non-hierarchical command interface. It used a Btrieve database for information storage. There were only about 30 TCL BBSs in Sweden and only one outside the country.

A bulletin board system or BBS is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging messages with other users through public message boards and sometimes via direct chatting. In the middle to late 1980s, message aggregators and bulk store-and-forward'ers sprung up to provide services such as FidoNet, which is similar to email.

KOM is a type of BBS, with a text-based input system. The first was QZ KOM, but soon others imitated the user interface.

FidoNet is a worldwide computer network that is used for communication between bulletin board systems (BBSes). It uses a store-and-forward system to exchange private (email) and public (forum) messages between the BBSes in the network, as well as other files and protocols in some cases.


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Baton Broadcast System

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ISCABBS, also known as ISCA, is a bulletin board system ("BBS"), formerly based at the University of Iowa. Dave's own version of Citadel, an early branch of the Citadel/UX BBS software, was developed to run ISCA. Like most Citadels, the focus is almost entirely on conversation between users.

TCL Corporation Chinese multinational electronics company

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Lyon Metro public transportation network in Lyon, France

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GNU Guile Scheme interpreter

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WWIV was a popular brand of bulletin board system software from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. The modifiable source code allowed a sysop to customize the main BBS program for their particular needs and aesthetics. WWIV also allowed tens of thousands of BBSes to link together, forming a worldwide proprietary computer network, the WWIVnet, similar to FidoNet.

The Major BBS bulletin board system software

The Major BBS was bulletin board software developed between 1986 and 1999 by Galacticomm. In 1995 it was renamed Worldgroup Server and bundled with a user client interface program named Worldgroup Manager for Microsoft Windows. Originally DOS-based, two of the versions were also available as a Unix-based edition, and the last versions were also available for Windows NT-based servers.

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BBS: The Documentary is a 3-disc, 8-episode documentary about the subculture born from the creation of the bulletin board system (BBS) filmed by computer historian Jason Scott of textfiles.com.

MikroKOM is a KOM (BBS) style BBS software written in Turbo Pascal. Originally it was written to run under CP/M on a MicroBee 128K, but was later ported to MS-DOS.


RelayNet was an e-mail exchange network used by PCBoard bulletin board systems (BBS's). By 1990, RelayNet comprised more than 200 bulletin board systems.

Alcatel is a French brand of mobile handsets owned by Finnish consumer electronics company Nokia and used under license by Chinese electronics company TCL Corporation. The Alcatel brand was licensed in 2005 by former French electronics and telecommunications company Alcatel-Lucent to TCL for mobile phones and devices, and the current license expires at the end of 2024. Nokia acquired the assets of Alcatel-Lucent in 2016 and thus also inherited the licensing agreements for the Alcatel brand.

Tk (software) GUI toolkit or framework

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<i>Religious Technology Center v. Netcom On-Line Communication Services, Inc.</i>

Religious Technology Center v. Netcom On-Line Communication Services, Inc., 907 F. Supp. 1361, is a U.S. district court case about whether the operator of a computer bulletin board service ("BBS") and Internet access provider that allows that BBS to reach the Internet should be liable for copyright infringement committed by a subscriber of the BBS. The plaintiff Religious Technology Center ("RTC") argued that defendant Netcom was directly, contributorily, and vicariously liable for copyright infringement. Netcom moved for summary judgment, disputing RTC's claims and raising a First Amendment argument and a fair use defense. The district court of the Northern District of California concluded that RTC's claims of direct and vicarious infringement failed, but genuine issues of fact precluded summary judgment on contributory liability and fair use.

Tcl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. It was designed with the goal of being very simple but powerful. Tcl casts everything into the mold of a command, even programming constructs like variable assignment and procedure definition. Tcl supports multiple programming paradigms, including object-oriented, imperative and functional programming or procedural styles.