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The BBS Documentary: A One Year Report
Jason Scott writes: "Readers of Slashdot might remember some stories posted about a BBS Documentary that was being filmed. Well, we're at about a year of production and I've released a status report about the project, including some pictures, some statistics (over 120 hours of footage have been filmed!) and some information about where the project is heading. If you remember reading about it last year and are wondering what's up with it, check it out."
Bulletin Boards were a lot of people's first introduction to the on-line world - that history needs to be preserved.
I still have e-mail I exchanged with some /. users in regards to memories that this project's opening had brought back to us, sitting in my inbox.
Ok, that is it, I am officially scared;
WHAT TRANSSEXUAL TRANSVESTITE IS DOING THE TIME WARP??? (and could they loan me a map to Transylvania?)
Could you pleeeease stop it, my life if going by way to quickly, slow it down folks, take a breather!
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
They evolved, or atleast helped in the evolution of slashdot, so everyone has to love BBoards!
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
This is an incredibly boring long-dead niche opinion, which absolutely no one agrees with.
And I'm appropriately tired and extremely high on the adrenaline keeping me awake. So I think: "Hmm... BBS? Heh - Ron Vibbentrop. Dead crab. Ni." Try and guess my train of thought.
hey, chat me.h ^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h ^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h ^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h ^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h ^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h ^h^h^h^h^h^h^h*** -NO
^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^
CARRIER- ***
+++ ATH0
ATDT 7148420000
*** CARRIER DETECT ***
CONNECTED AT 300 BPS
Major BBS v1.7
Welcom^M
T^M
C^M
> you bastard!
Uhm, I'll watch you stupid whippersnapper.
Why? Because BBSs were better than the fapping internet. They had a center. And community.
AND WE ONLY HAD DIALUP, AND WE LIKED IT.
AND WE HAD TO WHISTLE CARRIER TONE INTO OUR PHONES AND HOOK THEM INTO THE ACOUSTIC COUPLER AND WE LIKED IT.
You phucking make me puke with your lack of respect, you little fuck. You think data compression came about because the internet needed it? You try pulling 5 megs through a 300 baud modem. You'll be crying for xmodem and kermit and pkzip in 10 seconds.
Phuck.
What do you have Jason, hours of login screens in ANSI? Woohoo. Got any notable SYSOPS? Notorious ones, major traders or groups? What is the deal?
Agreed, this lamer, and that is the correct BBS term, has no brains. Must be a Paltalk on a Windows machine kinda guy! Turns my stomach. Lets blacklist him from the scene.
Now they just copy & paste shit from BME and expect it to retain its shock value without the associated pictures.
(Score:-1 - Yawn)
I'm 18 years old. When the BBSes were at their peak, I barely even knew what a computer was. Now, about 10 years later, people my age who have been using the 'net and other various online communication for several years are starting to realize the value of our figurative ancestors.
At the very least... I am. There's only so much one can learn about the past by reading. Hearing about the experience first-hand (or second-hand, as the documentary would be...) is another thing entirely. Can you be nostalgic about a past that you never had? I think so. This documentary will be great for people like me who want to know what "our" history was like.
Call me sentimental, but I get a little teary just thinking about it. The past is worth much more than some of you people (naieve newbies) take it for.
Karma: \Kar"ma\, n. [Skr.] (Buddhism) One's acts considered as fixing one's lot in the future existence.
I had the same reaction I had when I read the title last year...
Ok, the British Broadcasting System is making a documentary, but what the HELL is it about?"
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I must be a nerd.
When I think of BBS's, I think of "The General" (a huge multi-line board here in Houston that had a lot of .. interesting software). More fondly though, I think of "The Dojo", and the interesting and informative discussions that took place on NirvanaNet. & the Temple of the Screaming Electron" (&totse), one of the boards involved in NirvanaNet, eventually setup a basic website. Fun times.
Ah. 20-something, and this story makes me feel old .
Someone you trust is one of us.
From 10-28-92 until it was taken offline sometime in '97. I still have the entire system backed up to CD-Rs and my friends that remember the system want me to put it back online with a telnet/virtual serial port software setup.
The system was a lot of fun in its time, but bringing back old software wouldn't bring back the experience. People called local BBSes because they were the "open source" of the online world. I contributed my time and hardware so people wouldn't have to spend money on an expensive online service to particpate in message boards or download files. I was also a LOT younger at the time and working on the BBS was a great excuse to avoid homework.
At any rate, the first time I got on the actual Internet (through AOL, no less), I was in denial about the whole death of the BBS thing. I actually took the time to create a web page that had a virtual tour of my BBS. For the sake of preserving history, MOST of the site now exists on snotwad.com. Someday I'll get around to restoring the actual backups and put a more complete "virtual museum" of my BBS online.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
NO CARRIER!
rg 10-05 w/cdrmail and frontdoor on os/2 v3 (v4 a few years later). used virtual modem to allow people to get in over the net when i installed a 2nd modem. telnet and ftp access to the net for people connected on the first modem.
... i'd kill for the spam rates of '92 compared to now tho, no doubt.
echomail rocked. unfortunately, it was the first time i got spam
i distinctly remember buying a 16M simm at the killer rate of $140 and turning around and selling it to a local computer store for $200.
az had a pretty good bbs scene. bluenet, crossover, flamenet. it ruled.
Q: I met a girl on this BBS and we are going to meet in person. She told me that she had TB or VD, but I can't remember which. What should I do?
A: If she coughs, fuck her.
Has anyone seen my copy of ProComm?
I need the check out the picture Star Trek of the new show 'Next Generation'. My friend said it on FidoNet and I need to fetch this week's package. This will be sweet, the pic is sippose to be in 256 colors!
By the way has anyone seen WarGames yet? My aunt's C64 was done and I couldn't go.
This was a drama, that must likely did happen in the 80's. God help us all!
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Somebody oughta donate a decent microphone for this guy.
I can't believe he's using the on-camera mic! (At least for the interview with Jason)
That's the happy memory of the BBS era. Playing TW2002 with people, and kicking their asses in the 416. That game was great, hours of enjoyment, and the strategies applied both to game play, knowing when the system rolled over, and when your opponents played (and henced busying the line). Yes I was a geek back then, but boy was it a fun distraction..
It was an interesting time and the first board I connected to was Eternity III found from the C64 for advertisings... My C64... It had some fun games.
Those were the years when there actually was a community... Since good boards took effort to connect to.
Tournament Management Online &
http://web.archive.org/web/19971221012817/http://s lashdot.org/
To the wizards who modded my previous post -1 offtopic: that url is for an article Jason wrote because some losers were criticizing him for making the BBS movie!
The latest Slashdot meme.
Anyone remember TradeWars 2002? I was an addict of that space colonization/exploration BBS door. The funny part is that there are many places on the net that it's still a hugely popular niche. Good luck surviving a game though, these games are dominated by some pretty hardcore players... most of them using the things that killed the game for me: the handful of frontend GUIs that scripted a lot of the empire building work.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
A worthwhile aim, but an inexperienced director who shoots hundreds of hours for a series of documentaries with no funding and an apparent lack of planning is unlikely ever to complete it IMHO. Just editing all that footage would take him a couple of years.
I doubt we will ever be watching this on PBS unfortunately. I guess at least he will have fun interviewing all these BBS people...
There are lots of BBSs on today's internet in the form of telnet systems. To this day I still play TradeWars on quite a few of them. The BBS movement is alive and kicking, it's just taken a new form.
At our school, we don't earn a degree when we graduate—we earn pi/180 radians
they have just moved to telnet, thanks to programmers like Rob Swindell and Synchronet BBS software (www.synchro.net)
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Flame Entertainment is working on a program called FlameBBS. It is a Java BBS software designed for Linux, but usable in any UNIX variant with a jvm.
This project isn't our highest priority, but it will be if enough interest(personal emails, voting in polls, etc) is expressed.
I was an avid BBSer myself five years ago, and the history needs to be preserved.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
>In France wee can see lot of Mixed Marriage, I think that our society is much better.
That's only because you lamers give up the minute the partner says something racist to you.
"Please, take my country and my people! We don't want them!"
Lamers.
I'm GLAD someone is taking up the challenge to make a BBS documentary, the story needs to be told.
:)
In the summer of 1990 at the age of 10, I remember seeing a local BBS listing in the paper which inspired me to work as a paperboy with my older brother (so I could get a cut of the $), and save up for a computer and try the BBS's out.
Being raised on a TI-99/4a, and before the internet was popular around here, (sure it was in my school, but only on two computers with heavy restrictions), I had no idea of what I was getting myself into, and that was the FUN part! It was all about curiousity at first.
After saving up around $120.00, I saw an ad for a complete IBM XT system w/ CGA monitor, which at the time, and being 10 years old, I thought was a good deal. I also picked up a 2400 baud modem at my local electronics store which came with Qmodem.
So I sat down with my newspaper clipping of local boards and their numbers in front of my very own computer, I dialed...and connected.
Countless nights and weekends I was glued to the computer, dialing up, playing TW2002, and L.O.R.D. and checking all the different BBS's out. My first MajorBBS was "The Playground" Which had 4 lines at the time, but soon expanded to 8 LINES, needless to say i was in heaven. Chatting up the locals on the board what great fun, as well as Tradewars with 8 real-time local users.
Oh god the hours i spent on that system meeting people, talking, gaming, file downloading/uploading, message reading/writing. I guess i'm not the first to say this, but FIDOnet was a blast!
I met quite a number of people though BBS's, which I may have never otherwise met. During that time I became the owner of a local BBS though a hardware/software system purchase, met my first girlfriend at a BBS meet (which lasted for about a year, but being 13 at the time, it was very fun), and ran my own board for the better part of a year on a 486 that I got when i turned 15. Around 1995 and on the BBS scene started to die, and eventually became non-existent in my area by 1996. There was a gap for a while until we got internet access at home, then I found another, BIGGER world to explore. Nothing can truely replace or replicate the BBS times though, what I miss the most was the local community, and the thrill of being a part of it.
The fondest memories I have are playing Duke Nukem on a MajorBBS with 8 people on a board called DOGS. (Dave's Online Gaming Service)...God that was great!
As I sit here, 22 years old now, It seems like a faded memory. Yeah, i'm still young, but damn does this make me feel old.
Before I drown in my own memories, My question for Jason is: When your project is finished, how will you get it out to the people who want to see the fruits of your labor? Free or to pay for? I have no problem in paying for it, Just thought I'd ask.
Downloadable episodes of your documentary would be nice, but you'd need some good hosting for that.
Another alternative comes to mind, VHS tapes, or better yet a DVD.
Whatever's best for you. I'm really excited to see the finished product and support it wholeheartedly.
A Penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
I remember I used to program software for my high school company which was called Viking Entertainment. I made a few bucks because I designed some QBasic executables that helped copy disks faster than Microsoft's DiskCopy utility at the time.
Anyways, what I remember most about BBS' were the great games. Tradewars 2001, LORD-- it was all good. Plus I liked the Bank feature where I could store my daily minutes and save them up for downloads that would take a long time (like some Apogee demos that ran over 750k).
A company called Mikerosoft, located here in Vancouver, B.C., created a bunch of BBS games and utilities--- back then called Doors--- (the best called Scrawl, a message board where people did nothing but flame each other ;-)).
I immediately started work on two of my own games, using Ansi art and coding it in Turbo Pascal. Development went on for about 6 months and before I had decent versions, the Internet exploded and people forgot about BBS'. I still have those Doors on my backup CD's somewhere, and maybe if BBS' catch on again I will have a reason to finish them. R.I.P., Viking Entertainment ;-)
Confucious says: Man who runs behind car gets exhausted.
// jeku.com
The cool thing about BBSes was that the other people on them *were* local (as opposed to today, where the person at the other end of IRC could be in New Zealand or Greece). After chatting with them for hours, you got to know them. But then you could arrange to meet them in person. No worries about being abducted, killed, whatever -- they were people like you, who liked computers and liked the thought that you could talk to other people via them.
Ahh the good ol' BBS ...
.. we had about 25 local BBSes hooked in (Phoenix, AZ area) and at the peak of the network had over 100 bulletin boards hooked into the network with three hubs across the US and one in Europe. (glad I wasn't paying the phone bills..)
.. it cracked me up..
.. taught me a LOT about computers and networking really quickly ... It was lots of fun figuring out how to get all of the pieces connected together correctly (not to mention figuring out things like security, accessibility, interface design/layout, etc..) -- had many enjoyable memories helping out new sysops setup things like frontdoor & squish to let them hook into our fido network... not to mention setting up doors, eventually gatewaying to the internet for email, etc...
.. Sounds like there is a LOT of good information on it ... :)
I got into the BBS scene back in 1990 on my brand new 386sx-16 w/2400baud modem. Shortly after connecting to my first boards, I found myself as a co-sysop for a few boards and learned a variety of BBS packages (telegard, renegade, oblivion/2, remote access, pcboard, etc..)
After two years of being a sysop, we decided to setup a fido-based message network (ABBSnet -- association of bulletin board sysops)-- It was pretty cool
What was cool was the fact another local bulletin board sysop at the time was setting up his own fido based network and was totally pissed that ours was more successful (three of us under age 14 vs his network -- two guys in their 30s or 40s or something..) --- haha
Those were some really fun times
I can't wait to see this documentary
http://www.dmine.com/bbscorner/
Gets people started on everything BBS.
Don't let the Slashdot groupthink let you arrive at the incorrect conclusion that BBS's are a thing of yesteryear. The worthless ones have died, but there are still hundreds of online communities around; they're on the 'net now, and they're still the best places around to meet people worth having conversations with. BBSing didn't die -- it just changed its form a little.
I was interviewed for the documentary a little less than a year ago. It was a lot of fun and I hope it'll serve to get the word out that the hobbyist BBS is still one of the few places on the 'net still untainted by corporate pigopolist influence.
My BBS is linked below in my sig, in case anyone wants to drop by.
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