The following bit of unsubstantiated Pomona College/Star Trek lore has been floating around cyberspace and the campus computing network for some time now:

According to "The Starlog," ST:TNG's official magazine: The Borg are a race of mechanically-enhanced cybernetic beings that act and think as one. Perhaps millions in number, they exist only to absorb the technologies of those unfortunate civilizations they come into contact with. Emotion and personal considerations mean nothing to the relentless Borg, who will pursue their goals of conquest until they achieve them--or are destroyed trying. Individual Borg drones begin life as normal humanoid infants, but are quickly "adapted" to their assigned lifelong duties by the implantation of bionic components. This addition of technological parts continues until adulthood, when the individual is finally ready to be placed into its assigned place in the whole. Theory suggests that the Borg may have developed a method for accelerating the humanoid growth process, perhaps taking each Borg drone unit from infancy to adulthood in mere months.

Borg vessels are of a design dictated purely by function, with no aesthetic considerations, are immense cube-shaped structures capable of incredible firepower and speed greater than can be accounted for by any stretch of conventional Federation scientific imagination. The Borg appear to be centered in an area of space beyond the far side of the Romulan Empire. An intervention into Starfleet procedures by the "Q" has made the Borg aware of the Federation's existence long before such an encounter would have occurred naturally, opening the constant threat that further Borg intrusions into Federation space may occur. The Federation possesses a level of technology irresistibly attractive to the Borg--a technology they must absorb at any cost.

The Borg were created by Maurice Hurley. The term "Borg" is derived from Cyborg (Cybernetic organism). This is all the "Star Trek Encyclopedia" tells us, but the following explanation appeared last year in a Star Trek newsgroup:

"The creator of the Borg phenomenon is a graduate of Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., where Maurice lived for several years in a dormitory called 'Oldenborg,' nicknamed by the students on campus simply as 'The Borg.' The architectural layout of the dorm is like a giant maze, and there are all kinds of campus legends about people disappearing inside and never coming out. Along with this is the rather unflattering campus attitude towards those who move into Oldenborg that, because it is self-sufficient (i.e. has its own dining and other facilities), they become 'assimilated' and never reappear in the outside world."

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