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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."
google is pretty damn useful sometimes..
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
Sorry, I'm a moron. I meant software.bbsdocumentary.com and not hostnet.net. Just goes to show that 5 previews is STILL not enough.
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
I ran my BBS with RBBS-PC and was into it enough to have hacked up the source pretty good. I even shelled out for QuickBasic so that I could compile my modified versions.
By the late versions, RBBS-PC was so configurable and scriptable... add to that the available source code, and my BBS looked like no other, had a completely unique interface and did things like automatic virus scanning and conversion of uploads into multiple compression formats. Not like a lot of those WWIV systems which were all identical.
Come to think of it, RBBS-PC was really my first introduction to the fundamental concepts of open source. I don't even know if it was "open source" by modern standards, but having the source available allowed me to do my own thing and spend hours joyously hacking at little things I wanted to modify.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
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
I still like how Searchlight worked - redirect BIOS and DOS display routines (basically stdout), and emulate color changes and positioning using ANSI. Any program that used BIOS calls for i/o could run under it - in fact the core BBS program itself was just a regular program with no modem handling routines whatsoever - you just loaded the TSR, and told an init style program what to use as the inital login program.
I SysOped a half dozen boards from 1981 to 1993. I even got paid for two of them, and did many installs and configurations, some for friends, some as consulting work. My Dad got me into it - he was logging into some system via TeleNet back at the very end of the 70s for something having to do with Scientific Products. The community was still mostly Ham types who could soldier, and one threw a big BBQ twice a year at his small farm. One party he unveiled his new creation - one of the first BBSes in the area.
Ironically, I'd like to point out that at one of those parties somebody showed off a horribly slow but fun game that had you running around a 3D maze and shooting stick figures (the crosshair was always in the middle of the screen, and I believe that the stick figure moved back and forth). Some people still think Wolfenstein 3D was the first FPS. :)
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
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
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?
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.)
I've the privilege of knowing Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, the two who INVENTED the BBS (and coined the term) right here in Chicago. Ward is an on-site technical support rep that is working in my office a bit now. We had lunch a few days ago.
/. that Google had posted the USENET archives I checked for Ward's name. I told him that comes up with 700 messages, mostly mentioning his MODEM protocol as "the Ward Christensen protocol." Yeah, he invented file transfers by modem, too. Google returns over 54,000 web page matches for Ward's name. Ward laughs about how many hits you can get when his name is mis-spelled.
When it was mentioned here on
In 1978, Chicago had a severe blizzard and Ward and Randy wanted to share programs. Ward wrote the MODEM protocol to send the files back and forth.
During that snowstorm in January 1978, they invented CBBS to emulate the cork bulletin board at the meetings of the Chicago Computer Hobbyists Exchange (CACHE) user group that computer hobbyists used to post messages about wanted computer parts and such. They made use of a pair of direct connect 300 baud modems donated by Dennis Hayes. Randy built the S100 system and Ward wrote the program which they called CBBS. There was no operating system in those days, so the program talked directly to the hardware. It took them a month to have it done by the next CACHE meeting.
Ward is a pioneer that we all owe:
- He invented the world's first BBS program, CBBS.
- He wrote the world's first modem file transfer program, (X)MODEM.
-one the pioneers of FREE OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE. The company he works for would not let him sell programs he wrote so he gave them away. If you had an early CP/M system like I did, you knew that there were dozens and dozens of free useful utilities available on BBSs that were written by one W. Christensen.
BTW, they copyrighted the term "CBBS," not "BBS." Oh, well.
I'm sure the documentary team will be looking up Ward. I'll let him know about this and maybe he'll post.
P.S. Randy's Illinois license plate is CBBS. Ward's is XMODEM.
Trivia question: What does the C stand for? It's not what you think.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
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.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Lord's still around.. http://lord.lordlegacy.org .. Being ported to Win32 w/ door32, OS/2, and Linux. (some people might ask "why os2?" its easy for me to do win32 and os2 versions. change compile target, recompile, poof. done.) A telnet server and web version are both planned as well.
.. Make sure to use a good telnet client, such as Mtelnet..
Seth Able, the original author, got burned out on bbs coding.. Sold all of his software (Lord, Lord2, Teos, and TLord) to Metropolis.. They had the games for a good 2 years before allowing me to work on them.. This next June will make 3 years that Ive been working on them.
Want to see what the games like nowadays? telnet://bbs.lordlegacy.org
BBS's, while not as popular as they once were, are still going pretty strong. With telnet helping out, theyre making a good come back. Check out Synchronet, EleBBS, or Mystic for good telnet softwares.
Maybe looking for bbs chat? Grab an IRC client and go to irc.lordlegacy.org or irc.thebbs.org in #bbs
Looking for a list of boards? TheDirectory has a telnet list and a dialup list.
Looking for the bbs files? TheBBS's Archives is huge.
Looking for some good links? Sysops Corner has them