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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..
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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!!
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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.
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