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BBS Documentary Starting To Film
Jason Scott writes "Well, the BBS Documentary, after years of research and 4 months of pre-production, is set to film starting the first week in January. Once the filming starts, it's a solid year or more of interviews, travel, and hopefully some great footage of some very unique and interesting people. I'd like to thank Slashdot for the burst of letters and support, and I really appeciate the contacts they've helped me make with an amazing spectrum of folks to interview. The list is not complete, but I've so far gotten a great list of interviewees who helped make the Dial-Up BBS what it is in history (and today, I rush to add). Of course, the research is never done, and I encourage people to check out the BBS Software List and the timeline to help me flesh them out even more."
I always found this website good in reminding me of 'the old days'...
Does anyone remember RoboBBS? It was a fully VGA gui based bbs that ran on DOS. You could even preview pictures before you downloaded them.. It would convert the pic into a B/W jpeg so it wasn't even that bad on a 2400bps modem. Now pointing and clicking online is just mainstream.
That sounds like a pretty good description of LORD to me, although there were some other very similar games about too. LORD was really addictive with most BBS users, although I can't understand why because it was to me very simple and repetitive. One of the local bbs'es (TooNTowN) even imposed a ratio; you had to post a few reasonably intelligent messages (no "first post!"'s allowed) before you got access to the door games because people were calling to play LORD all day and nothing else.
:)
:)
There was also a similar game (written by the same people iirc) set in a lunatic asylum. You had to fight the other inmates and eventually guess the code on the door to escape.
And then there was "Food Fight" and "Booger Flick" and about a million other really lame games, mostly written in BASIC because speed didn't matter when you're playing over a 2400 baud modem.
I helped set up the second BBS in Hamilton (it was supposed to be the first, but someone else beat us to it by about a week!). We got some help from a posh private school, so we had a 286 with a -huge- (40M) harddrive and a -very fast- (2400 baud) modem to run it on. There wasn't a great choice of software to use back then either; I can't remember what we used, that was a long time ago. Much later I ran my own BBS using Maximus for a few years and maintained the local BBS list. For a while I ran something under Linux too, wrote my own fido-to-usenet gateway, and gave up the scene a little while after when "the scene" had become just three fairly lame systems. (I admit.. my BBS was fairly lame too
I should post anonymously because this is a content-free rant and everyone will realise how OLD I am now.. but I won't.. go on, mod me down damn you!!
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
Yeah, but IIRC, you had to download a special client for it. You couldn't just dial in with any old terminal program. That's why it never went mainstream. I remember it being kind of a pain in the ass, too. I tried it once.. In order to test it, I had to get one of my friends to download the client, then dial in.. and if something went wrong, I'd have to call back and tell him to dial again.. It was just too much of a hassle.
On a somewhat unrelated (to this thread) note, I find it odd that they didn't have much (or any) information on the most popular BBS software. I remember WWIV, MajorBBS, and Renegade being pretty popular, at least around here.
-Dave
The software I remember best from that time is the stuff I used to communicate with bbs's, in my days as a point. Software like Frontdoor, fmail, gecho, GoldED, and the like.
:-)
But maybe that would be more appropriate for a documentary on the history of fidonet, even though most bbs's in the Netherlands were(are?) a part of Fidonet, and all its clones. In those days there was a new network every month, because there was yet another person who had a fight with the fidonet "officials".
I also remember that Quarterdeck Desqview/386 was very important for many bbs's. Real multitasking waaay before windows nt
karma capped
Anybody remember the Excalibur BBS system? The sysops were promised a 32-bit version from Excalibur Communications but never got one. I don't remember what the last release was though. Anyway, for those that don't remember Excalibur, it ran on Windows. It was a gui BBS system with a gui client. You never really typed anything to navigate in menus. Some sysops made a whole page a big gif picture. Took forever to load the damn thing. Anyway, Excalibur Communications went out of business and I've been trying to find someplace that still has the server. For nothing else than nostalgia.
Excalibur died because of the web. The web was cheaper, faster and pretty much always better. And of course, the content wasn't tied to the sysop of a system. So in that respect one can say it was a failure. But other than that, it was pretty cool.
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -Ayn Rand
Does anybody remember the Blue Wave offline mail reader?
:-(
I have participated in FidoNet discussions for years using it, altough I have never became a "FidoNet point".
Also, what about an UseNet vs. FidoNet vs. mailing lists comparison? FidoNet had some advantages.
I belive that FidoNet was superior, because public messages (echo mail) included a To: field.
When I downloaded a new mail package and opened it in my mail reader (Blue Wave) Blue Wave would show me all the messages addressed to me, listing the private messages (NetMail) first, then the public (EchoMail) messages. This is just not possible with mailing lists - I never know which of the public messages on the list answered my messages.
The quoting style used in the message areas was better than the quoting style used by today's e-mail programs. If you quoted a message by Anonymous Coward, the lines of the message were preceded by AC> (the initials were used). In large group discussions, this allowed us to know who wrote certain quoted lines.
Also, when downloading FidoNet mail, the mail packets were compressed using an archiver.. which could be ZIP, or ARJ, or RAR, or whatever the sysop provided. You could usually choose between compression methods. This way one could download hundreads of messages very efficiently.
Currently, POP3 servers don't have this feature.
I'm sure a few people out there can remember the politics surrounding the BBS "scene" -- that is to say, a certain segment of the community that did everything possible to be considered "elite". Some will say speak for your own experience; that's fine, but it doesn't dismiss the phenomenon that couldn't possibly have been local to my area only...
So much of it being a competition likely didn't help the matter -- who had the most warez, who could get the most artwork, who could do the best set up, who could hold the best networks, who had the best users, etc etc. There was so much hate in some of these people, too. Not just out of competition, either. The fact warboards even existed only goes to verify this. As I got older, I realized the silliness of it all, as I'm sure other people did too. To say some people took it too seriously would be an understatement.
I always take the conference of BBS nostalgia with a grain of salt. It was fun, but there were just so many unpleasant folks out there they ruined the experience for everyone. They know who they are, and they didn't contribute shit other than efforts overshadowed by ugly attitudes.
mwtr / THIS SIG HAS BEEN PRAYED OVER AND MAY BE USED AS A POINT OF CONTACT (ACTS 19:12)
Oh yeah, FidoNet was Usenet, Zmodem was FTP, ANSI graphics was Flash, and spam was practically nonexistant.
Good times...
They have the Internet on computers now?
- WWIV
- RBBS
- Renegade - this was great
- Maximus/2 - also great
OS/2 ended up being the platform I stuck with because of its decent multitasking ability. It was neat being able to watch users in a little window while I was working on something else in another. That was such a big deal back then! =)Doors - here are my favorites (the ones I can remember!):
- LORD - Legend of the Red Dragon
- LOD - Land of Destruction
- GWARS - Global Wars - Risk-like game - real fun
- Tradewars
- Chess
- Foodfight
Favorite terminal emulators:- Telix - was my DOS favorite for a LONG time
- Terminate - this was, hands down, the absolute best.
- Procomm was OK not the greatest - I mention it only because I remember it
Hosting a BBS was such a gratifying experience for some reason. It actually was rewarding for me to give a free service to the public.ANSI art - that was fun... Wish I could remember the name of my favorite ANSI art package.... Something with a "T" I think... Can't remember.
Well, thanks to all for bringing back those good memories!
Chris
In the Philly area, what is now Voicenet was originally a files-n-pr0n BBS back in the day. The gent who ran it was a serious hobbyist. His system grew to something like 50 lines. Nowadays, with T1s leading into Ascend boxen, managed by a single Radius server, 50 lines is not unthinkable. But hobbyists back then knew nothing of Unix. So 50 lines meant that he had 50 386s! And no rack mounting... these were on cheap bent-metal racking with scores of wall warts for the modems! I think it was all in his garage or something.
I heard that the guy was astounded out of his gourd to see one of the first SLIP-oriented ISPs set up correctly with those same 50 lines run from two Sun pizza boxes.
(My own BBS lives on in the form of a web community. The Cellar, est. 1990. The IotD in my sig is just a part of it.)
Indeed, looking at the large BBS's that survived the transition and those that died is a grand look at how businesses change. The story of how BBS's transformed into ISP's is a central part of the story.
:-)
:-)
Exec-PC was, indeed, a large BBS. It was not the largest though - that honour went to Canada Remote Systems (CRS Online) in Toronto.
CRS ran PCBoard software on over 230 nodes. In 1993/94, that was the biggest board around - anywhere in the world.
But CRS could not survive the transition to ISP. It fumbled horribly.
In a nutshell - many of CRS' customers were FIdoNet enthusiasts. When dial-up ISP's started, there was no easy client interface avilable to permit CRS customers to keep Fidonet access. CRS fumbled the ball by trying to go to a custom (and buggy) client for dial up access to their ISP which allowed for Fido.
It was a collosal failure and a horrible client.
CRS died a fiery death in late 1995. They tried to keep to the old ways - and paid the price.
An interesting sidenote is that in Toronto at the same time, a tiny competing BBS, Computerlink Online emerged as a power house which killed CRS and became one of the greatest success stories of the BBS era.
Computerlink originally started up as a "support" board for its owners, who operated a sleazy software rental company, located in a run down strip mall in the west end of Toronto.
As you might imagine, the whole concept of software rental was simply a scam for legalized software piracy. Members of Computerlink paid for a mebership and then, for about $9 more per rental, they got a copy of the original software to take home overnight. You then copied those floppies as fast as you could.
Members of the software rental club also got access to Computerlink's "support" BBS system. The BBS was basically an attempt to create something to justify the cost of "membership" in the software rental club. It was little more than a transparent attempt to provide some legitimacy for the "membership cost" to local law enforcement authorities.
In 1994/95, as part of the phased in scheduling of NAFTA, the Canadian government amended the Copyright Act and outlawed software rental.
The core business of Computerlink was out of business at the stroke of a pen. Not all was lost though, as Computerlink's BBS had grown successfully and had become a decent little chat board with close to 30 lines. In expanding it from its original 4 lines, Computerlink gained valuable skills at managing the addition of phone lines to an existing system. Computerlink was moderately successful, but CRS Online was much too large and established to compete against as a full fledged monthly membership online service.
Forced to change its business with the outlawing of the software rental business, and unable to compete head to head against CRS Online, Computerlink decided to expand by setting up another dial up access system (sharing their existing phone lines) to run one of the first public access ISP dial-ups in Canada.
There were others out there, and many had a head start, but Computerlink had gained valuable skills on the BBS side from adding phone lines to its system while still managing to to keep it all running.
Were they successful?
They grew like topsy. Computerlink grew and grew and its dial up division became "Internet Direct" -Canada's largest "independent ISP". At its height (before @Home), Internet Direct was Bell Canada's single largest customer in Canada. Bigger even than the Federal Government.
But - the story gets better!
As part of a parallel service it provided to BBS users, Computerlnk ALSO developed an HTML based web site for making free downloaded shareware available to its IP users - just like on the Computerlink BBS.
The web site? Well, you guys might have heard of the site. It had a real stupid name. They called it TUCOWS.
The original owners of Computerlink took their 4 line BBS from 1992, and by the time John Nemanic and his partners cashed out in 1999, they sold Internet Direct and Tucows.com for well over Five Hundred ("500") Million Dollars.
Not bad at all.
.Robert
As usual, the Slashdot groupthink refers to BBS's as a "thing of the past." Listen folks, BBS's are not dead. Dialup is dead, yes. BBS's have moved to the Internet. Those that didn't evolve have died off. Those that did, are thriving. Click to log on. Telnet, SSH, web, your choice. Client software, the whole works. Some BBS programs are even evolving into nice-looking groupware systems.
You can bet your bitbucket that I'm going to drive this point straight home when I'm interviewed for the BBS documentary. BBS's are not dead.
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