BOS is a family of free services provided for the BOINC community. These services are mainly meant for web sites targeting this community, but some are or can be used directly by the community members.

When BOS started back in 2005 the idea was to make it possible for project participants to see when their favorite projects were online. SETI@home had at that time had a few problems getting back up and running again after some outages - simply because every time someone noticed they were up, every one was hitting the Update button on their BOINC CC , flooding the server with traffic - making every one wonder if the project was actually up.

Every time a project is down, the message boards are flooded with questions - varying from people thinking the BOINC CC doesn't work through the project servers doesn't work and many other "conspiracy" theories. And the aim of the original BOS image, and the aim of OSS, is to bring down the flood of questions and connection attempts, by answering alot of questions in a very simple manner.

End 2006 BOS began slowly to change from just one service to a whole range of services. This was done with Account Creation Status which was first tested on the ESEA (Earth Space Exploration Agency) team web site. ACS would mark the point in which BOS became a family in 2007.