about 57,000 bits in one second. Full-motion full-screen video would require roughly 10,000,000 bits-per-second, depending on compression. See also: Bit, bps, T-1 Baud In common usage the baud rate of a modem is how many bitsit can send or receive per second. Technically, baud is the number of times per second that the carrier signal shifts value - for example a 1200 bit-per-second modem actually runs at 300 baud, but it moves 4 bits per baud (4 x 300= 1200 bits per second). See also: Bit, Modem BBS -- (Bulletin Board System) A computerized meeting and announcement system that allows people to carry on discussions, upload and download files, and make announcements without the people being connected to the computer at the same time. In the early 1990's there were many thousands (millions?) of BBS?s around the world, most are very small, running on a single IBM clone PC with 1 or 2 phone lines. Some are very large and the line between a BBS and a system like AOL gets crossed at some point, but it is not clearly drawn. Binary Information consisting entirely of ones and zeros. Also, commonly used to refer to files that are not simply text files, e.g. images. See also: MIME, UUENCODE Binhex -- (BINary HEXadecimal) A method for converting non-text files (non-ASCII) into ASCII. This is needed because Internet e-mail can only handle ASCII. See also: ASCII, MIME, UUENCODE Bit -- (Binary DigIT) A single digit number in base-2, in other words, either a 1 or a zero. The smallest unit of computerized data. Bandwidthis usually measured in bits-per-second. See also: Bandwidth, Bit, bps, Byte, Kilobyte, Megabyte BITNET -- (Because It's Time NETwork (or Because It's There NETwork)) A network of educational sites separate from the Internet, but e-mail is freely exchanged between BITNET and the Internet. Listservs, a popular form of e-mail discussion groups, originated on BITNET. BITNET machines are usually mainframes running the VMS operating system, an...
