BIFF

BIFF - Page 1

This article is about the Usenet pseudonym. For the Berlin International Film Festival, see that article. For other meanings, see Biff (disambiguation).

BIFF, later sometimes B1FF, was the most famous pseudonym on, and the prototypical newbie of, Usenet, the precursor to the World Wide Web. Now virtually unknown outside of a hard core of pre-web internet technophiles, BIFF was created as and widely taken up as a satire of a partly amusing, partly annoying, mostly unwelcome intrusion into a then fairly rarefied community.

BIFF

BIFF was apparently a pre-adolescent American with no real computer skills (or life skills) but possessed of a then novel home computer and a then even more novel internet connection. Posts from BIFF were characterised by all-uppercase typing liberally interspersed with bangs, typos, "cute" misspellings, use (and often misuse) of fragments of chat abbreviations, a long sig block ("Signature"), sometimes even a doubled sig, and a combination of extreme naïveté and overweening self-confidence in this new (to "him") domain.

A sentence exemplifying BIFF would be: