The main backbone of the Internet here in the U.S. is the NSFNet. It stands for N ational S cience F oundation Net. Although it is traditionally interpreted, compilers exist for many platforms. While the interpreted form is typically fairly slow, the comiled form is often quite fast, usually faster than Pascal. BBSs have waned in popularity as more and more people are instead connecting to the Internet, but they are still used for product support and local area access.
Most current BBSs provide some sort of gateway connection to the Internet.
A beta version of something is not yet ready for prime time but still possibly useful to related developers and other interested parties. Expect beta software to crash more than properly released software does. Beta versions of non-commercial software are more often freely available to anyone who has an interest. A measure of communications speed, used typically for modems indicating how many bits per second can be transmitted. There are two meanings for binary in common computer usage.