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A Documentary About Bulletin Board Systems

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the fidogram dept.

Windrip writes: "Jason Scott is compiling a history of the BBS. The BBS documentary is a virtual park bench waiting for people who want to reminisce about the good old days of FIDO, 9600 baud, zmodem. /. had an earlier post from Jason about textfiles.com, now he's looking for a few of the million stories in the naked net."

2 of 300 comments (clear)

  1. BBSes versus the Internet by Cerlyn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I used to be quite active on the local BBS scene. Operators would get the latest archive CD-ROMs of the day, and then post them online for others to access.

    Nowadays, no one really uses BBSes anymore. Everyone has direct links to the resources BBSes used to offer. Most of Walnut Creek's old content was available from ftp.cdrom.com (now run by simtel.net). Want music from the Hornet Archive? You can't purchase the CD anymore; you go online to hornet.org.

    This extreme centalization of content worries me. Instead of colleges purchasing CD-ROMs of technical abstracts, they now subscribe to an ever-changing online service that provides them. Should said service go under or lose their data, humanity as a whole is at a loss.

    Call me a troll, but one of the biggest reasons we should be against DMCA, SSSCA, and other such acts is because they require all content to be managed from a central authority. Should that authority go bankrupt, millions could lose access to a variety of works.

    While peer-to-peer is one extreme the industry does not like, centralization is another problem. We need to start up the BBS era again; anyone have money for a spare phone line?

  2. Re:Gee, How Exciting by dillon_rinker · · Score: 5, Funny

    The fastest touch-typist in the world can't type faster than a 300 bps modem can transmit; 110 bps maybe. Of course, most hackers, are hunt-and-peck and can't even reach that. However, I can still remember when I could read faster than my modem could transmit. I'd wait impatiently for the words to finish displaying on my Apple II's greenscreen monitor III, which leads to my point:

    You kids complain these days about how long it takes for your fancy videos to download...well, back in MY day, we had to wait for the WORDS to finish downloading, and we LIKED it! We didn't have none o' these annymaitud JIFF files, and we only had one color, GREEN, and the pixels were the size of your fist! And we LIKED it that way! And those empty threes you like to listen to, why, back in my day we were just happy that we could hear CHR(7) - sometimes we'd listen to it over and over! You kids today are soft...sad, so sad...