Slashdot Mirror
7 hour BBS Documentary Nearly Ready
spyrochaete writes "Jason Scott, proprietor of textfiles.com, is nearing completion of his 3-DVD, 7 hour documentary on the history of the BBS. This documentary is 3 years in the making and is a patchwork of nearly 250 interviews spanning hundreds of hours. Trailers and samples are available for download (also available in low quality for you 300 BAUDers out there). Pre-order before Nov. 10 and you can submit a paragraph to be included on a file on one of the DVDs."
I've started work on a Slashdot documentary. Anyone want to be interviewed?
I'll be right back, I'm taking Violet upstairs.
Random is the New Order.
Am I the only one who thought that with 3 DVDs you could store most of the BBS systems and let readers find out what it all was for themselves?
Moooo! Great to see Sketchcow doing this before all of us old farts who cut our teeth on 300bps BBSes die off.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
How long before these dvd's are ripped and on some BBS/P2P network? Place your bets.
I'm definitely a filmgeek.
Less is more.
70 minutes is always better than 7 hours
Who needs 7 hours to talk about primitive fileswapping and Trade Wars? This could be good if it were a normal length, but 7 hrs sounds just phenomally dull. Then again, I'm one of those people who gets bored 5 minutes into the average "special features" section of a DVD. Only documentaries that have held my interest for more than half an hour so far were Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent".
Who the heck wants to watch a film about cork boards full of ads? What a bunch of weirdos.
For free?
With the cyberthalamus, the singularity will happen.
Just makes me want to pull up the 300bps hayes log onto the old Renegade system and play Tradewars.
Many subjects have been distilled into 2 hour documentaries. Sure, two hours of film won't make you an expert, or communicate the full depth of knowledge, but it can show a great deal. I am sure that the history of the BBS is a rich and potentially interesting subject. However, I am sure it isn't so complex and full of details that it could not survive a 2-hour treatment.
A seven hour documentary will be watched by 7 people, and interest none. The subject would be far better served by something edited to a size mere mortals could digest.
My Photography - http://ian-x.com
The Deathlings (comic) - http://thedeathlings.com
I just can't imagine there are many people who care enough about nerds dialing up bulletin boards to spend 7 hours watching them.
Awww yeah! Let me dust off my terminex and dialup some RENEGADE BBS. Remember how systems would brag about having a 14.4Kbps modem like it was the greatest thing. Remember leaving your phone off the hook so you could use your own computer that you were hosting a bbs off of? Everyone thought you had the most popular board. What ever happened to insane utopia in the 703??
They should market this as a form of birth control.
...but sometimes, maybe not enough people will care. I was into the BBS stuff and all for years and years. Now that we have the internet, it's wide-open to everyone and doesn't seem that special anymore. There's certainly a very rich history in BBSes - all of the things we now take for granted on the internet now were being developed in the BBS community. But now, BBSes are bygone memories as we move forward. Long gone are the days of hours of downloading, constant busy signals and expensive long-distance dialing.
Though the BBS world was more tightly knit in some ways, it was also expensive to run and use. If there's anything I've learned, is how the BBSes make the internet look really good now.
I think most people could care less about BBSes, but I suppose for the few tens/hundreds of thousands of us who experienced it, the nostalgia factor is enough to encourage us to watch this. We can tell the young whipper-snappers "You young 'uns have it really good. Why back in my days, we had to..."
7 freakin hours!?!?!
I'd have a hard time sitting through a seven hour documentary on WWII. Who in the world is nerdy enough to want to watch all of this??
These pretzels are making me thirsty.
I read the blurb as being a 7 hour documentary of the BBC. Which seemed like it might be OK (depending on how much focus was spent on Monty Python, Blackadder, Mr. Bean, and Dr. Who) but certainly nothing to fuss over. Time to fire up the ol' Mr. Coffee!
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
There actually is something worse than 300 baud:
A 300bps winmodem.
I hope they will also release an AAlib converted version. Can't wait to telnet a port and watch the video (with subtitles, obiouvsly)
Does anybody remember C/Net BBS? (C=64) It was the only one that supported ASCII movies. You could create "movies" of buffered commands. Man those were the fun times....
C64 + Digiboard + 2 phone lines + two 1581 drives.
LORD was great, there was a bug in the casino though. One of the games offered 2:1 odds, and played at exactly that ratio. It was soo easy to get millions of "credits". We then used those credits to offset download ratios. =)
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
My best guess is 6 1/2 hours of the footage will be featuring the downloading of pr0n at 300bps.
:P
and the remaining 30 mins will be people sitting around waiting for the Callback verifiers to ring back so they can set up a new account
Does anyone have any suggestions for my paragraph? I was thinking of saying something about the fact that anyone can setup their own old-school BBS if they want to, possibly with reference to the fact that a modem does work, all be it slowly, on the bonus voice(/fax) line that you get with (A)DSL. But I'm up for any other suggestions.
It's 7 hours long for a reason -- they're simply scrolling the text of everything that's ever appeared on a BBS (think the intro to Star Wars, except with stuff from BBSland).
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
It was the 'first' one to offer Super VGA graphics. You d'loaded all the graphics to your system, and then the system then queued various icons, backgrounds, and screens so that it appeared that you were browsing a SVGA system.
Very easily lent itself to themes. I was blown out of the water when I first saw that.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Wait for the 4 disc special extended edition DVD's.
I will say that I was one of the hundreds of people Jason interviewed for this documentary. I look forward to seeing what he has compiled and released, even though I am "on the cutting room floor". Apparently my view was a bit to political and he could not get enough corroburating testimony to include it. My understanding of his process was to get all he could and then whittle it down to a decent amount of information. I am getting a copy because it reflects the History of where we were and what we have come from. Without the BBS systems, do you really think the technology we have today would be in place? Heck, I spent more for the parts and pieces to have a multi-line BBS than most people earn in a year. R&D of USR, Maxtor, and SONY should have a plaque with mine and few others names on it. In these days of the Internet and Instant information....grabbing a local connection to a local board was the only real way to get solid tech information...or to chat with friends.....or just hang out and download some really bad EGA pr0n.
You keep going until you die..."Me".
You damn kids today and your Xvid-this and gigawhatsit-that. You don't know how good you got it. Grrr.
Get owrf my lawn!
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
I remember when I was working for an Engineering firm, one of the largest in the world at the time (late 90's). They needed to get some drawings out ASAP and the T1 was down, they didn't have an on site admin.
I saw an old Hayes modem sonnected to a computer that nobody used. Everybody was shocked and amazed when I fired up a terminal and typed in ATDT + the phone number (the guy needing the files had a modem as well - he knew how to use it). LOL. Everybody was trying to figure out out to send the files by courrier, or even pay for a plane ticket for hardcopies.
3 years in the making, and (at 300baud) 11.4 years in the downloading!
--
make install -not war
I have to agree with you, even the trailers made me sleepy. I bet there isn't a single person alive who could take all seven hours of that film without taking a nap.
Who else preordered a copy?
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
Recording the pioneers of global electronic communication is important as we'll never see a 'Google News-esque' archive of BBS systems and networks like FidoNet.
www.lonseidman.com
7 hours is a bit excessive for anything (LOTR anyone?), but i'd probably still watch the whole thing.
I've sat & watched xmodem downloads for longer, dammit. At least all of us who used boards did gain one benefit from it - patience.
1. redial
2. connect
3. download, logoff at 11:59pm
4. redial @ 12:01am
5. connect
6. use fresh file credits for more downloading
7. play newly acquired 4mb shareware game
The trailers are awful. I can't imagine anyone shelling out FIFTY DOLLARS for this. Do they realize the kind of entertainment I can buy for fifty bucks? Damn, I can get The A-Team Season One.
In the early 80's, I was as big a fan of BBSs as anyone else, but 7 hours? Is there an interview with every single person who ever dialed into one? Yikes.
Someday a real rain is gonna come...
until I know when the extended edition will be coming out.
"Teachers leave us kids alone
Looking at the website, the DVD's content seems to be episodic with some decent interviews (like Dr. Cerf). I think it's amazing that he got 7 hours of tape just on BBS's. But for narrative's sake, I hope he grouped the interviews/footage into episodes that are either topical or chronological.
What type of treatment would you prefer on this subject?
I would prefer a topical divison of episodes because BBS gaming would be fascinating as I spent a bit of time playing them (my favorite was Trade Wars or was it called Space Wars? It feels like it was eons ago). I wonder if he addresses how they led into the multi-player games we currently have today. A discussion on modem development would also be interesting as would a discussion on the culture of BBS users. A topical division would also allow me to skip parts that might not interest me like BBS programs available on OS/2 (A topic which I could care less about). However, a chronological treatment would be fine, but I think it would get either tedious and/or obtuse by the end having weaved so many themes/points throughout it.
Lastly, since I work at a Science Center, I hope the episodes/chapters aren't too long because it would be great to show them in my gallery! Overall, I look forward to getting my hands on this!
The BBS world seems like a lifetime ago. For over two years I ran the european regional mail and echomail hub for the GT Power network from a 286 that buzzed away at the end of my bed. I dreamed of a day when everybody could use email to talk to not only geeks, but also friends and relatives. Now we have the day. The PC doesn't buzz at the end of my bed anymore, but instead I'm plagued by spam and spy-ware. My illusions are shattered. On the plus side, I was still developing utilities back then, primarily for the network. Probably some of the most fun I've ever had. TO my surprise much of the code that I wrote can still be found in old archives, although most of it just seems to bomb out with a Runtime error 002 nowadays.
What's this '14k' you speak of? In my day, we had 300bps, and we liked it! Sometimes I even used 110bps for that extra-old-timey feel!
Hell, we even called bps 'Baud', and we liked it, because we didn't know any better!
And that's the way we liked it!
Putting moderation advice in your
I respect the man's work and all, and I certainly think that this is a noble effrot. Therefore, I do know that it is premature to denegrate and give thoughts on something that has not yet even been released.
That said, while I am interested in seeing the results of the work, I cannot say I am looking forward to the results. Among my circle of friends (whom I do not want to identify, hence my anonymity. Sorry.), many of us feel lik Mr. Scott may be a "Michael Moore", of sorts, of the tech documentary community, which is aggreably a small community, but none one the less. It's hard to put any effort together without taking a side, and for Mr. Scott to focus so much on the past does a disservice to how much better things are now. I appreciate hobbies, but this is bordering on obsession. There is way too much material and most viewers honestly won't give a poop.
However, I suppose the best thing to do is wait and see, right? Hopefully my views will be changed and I will post again to correct myself. Who knows. From what I've heard, though, Mr. Jason Scott as a person isn't anything to write home about. He can be an incredible jerk sometimes and other things. I suppose like any "art", one should focus on the art instead of the art.
Jason Scott is dead. Long live Jason Scott. Bastard. *wink*
bbs's brought many good things to my recreational time.. hell, i used em up until about '97 or so.. still use some of the Telnet boards so I can do my occasional whoop ass in L.O.R.D.
i remember deleting my 3 megabyte games time and time again because I didn't have more than a 40mb hard drive.. needed to conserve as much space as possible.. but i'd always re-download those shareware games on my 2400 baud.. i was stoked to be one of the only people in my city to have faxing capabilites with my modem..
should be an interesting documentary to watch.. looking forward to seeing it.. but damn $50 is a lot for a movie on BBSs.. yes i cherish the memory of BBSs, and am looking forward to seeing some of the interviews, but I'd rather spend like $20 or $30..
- Hi I'm Linus Torvalds and I pronounce Linux, Lih-nix..
I'm disappointed, I was expecting something more like this
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
The author of this video has said he'll release the complete, unedited interviews of I believe everyone to Archive.org about a year after the DVD is released. Now, if only the authors of Revolution OS would do the same thing.
I'm Scruffy.
... because after we start dying out, nobody will be interested in my stories of saving up ($115) for my Hayes MicroModem ][ with direct plug into the phone line! (No acoustic couplers for me, nosiree!)
Of course, I couldn't afford the fancy-schmancy touch-tone dialing, so I got to hear the relay clicking out the pulse for each number.
Good times, good times.
--
Free Gmail invite -- last one's up for grabs.
If you really want to watch a movie that will be over after gentoo finishes compiling try The Cure for Insomnia
I only have 110 baud, you insensitve clod!
Please direct all replies to Compuserve ID 72240,2510.
I thought that in the 110 and 300 bps days, bps was the same as baud.
But I could be wrong.
Who else got sick of newbies using Windows Terminal and not understanding why the ANSI menus looked stupid with no color / extended characters and explained: "All you do is wait three seconds, type three + signs, wait three more seconds, type ATH, and hit enter"
Ahh... Door games, TW2002, The Pit... Then inter-BBS door games (the predecessors of today's MMOG) BRE was the best... The hours of busy redial trying to get on to play my turns! Then there was the wonderful waits, such as downloading Doom on a 2400 baud modem. Or a copy of Leisure Suit Larry 4. Oh, and remember when Xmodem and Ymodem started to be phased out by Zmodem? Oh, and the myriad of different compression formats... When was the last time you saw a .lzw or .arj file?
hehe what irony,
RIP will RIP.
Yeah I agree that it was very bloated, but that fact that it worked was awesome. The first time I heard about I was sure my buddy was lying to me.
One of my best friends today, was a fellow SYSOP, that I met all those years ago.
Anybody from Southern Ontario, remember Ground Zero?
Fast Doors
Ahh the nicks we used to have;
The Byte Bandit,
Mr. Toby
Madness
Only part of the movie Hackers that I enjoyed; where the kid is telling his friend: "I gotta have a cool nick, without a nick you are nothing."
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Every hour you watch of this documentary will make another 10 years of your life awkward and sexless
If that's what happens when you watch it... you have to wonder what happens to the guy that MADE it... hmm.....
Can't find any mention of milliways or monochrome, the two most influential BBS systems in the UK over the last 15 years. These two systems are responsible for a whole generation of Linux hackers (including Alan Cox), yet there's nothing about them on the website. Oh well. Maybe in v1.1 of the documentary?
Ok, it'll be beaten to death here, but here's the numbers:
The shortest video they have, at 2 MB and just about a minute, would take 19 hours to download at 300 baud. More time if there were any errors (the 300 baud modems didn't error-correct; that was done in software).
The same video at highest quality (22.9 MB) would take 9.25 days to download... for a minute of video.
Never mind that this would take 15 and 168 Apple ][ disks (respectively), and that the high quality version would require almost 3 disk changes a second during playback. The old drive heads would take over a second just to move across the disk, much less read any data.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
This documentary is actually the sequel to Jason Scott's previous 16 hour epic "The history of drying paint", a compilation of 724 of the most historically important paints, uh, drying.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
Years ago, after I moved to the big city to go to University, tons of BBSes started sprouting up.
So I subscribed to one of the biggest ones available... and I stole someone else's girlfriend by showing her ANSI art that I had "borrowed" on smaller free BBSes.
Zmodem or Xmodem? Or...Ymodem? Now downloading is all point and click, but back then you had to choose your packet size or else waste another half hour on that 500k download. Good times.
I still visit Exec-PC BBS from time to time to grab older DOS or OS/2 files that I can't easily find anywhere else.
Curious? Click here to telnet
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Eventually the BBS'es became just springboards to logging onto the Internet through shell accounts. Before that turning point it was neat to think of the locality of communications. How you could walk past someone in a bookstore, at a bar, or at the movies and they could be someone from the local BBS you were part of.
For anyone interested, check out this site. You can download your own Renegade BBS for fun and profit. Errr...for fun I guess.
At this point, however, it's comparable to documenting every contributor to steam engines and printing presses -- we don't know what's important and what's not to people fifty years in the future. Cisco routers use XModem and ZModem to transfer IOS images to the firmware -- seeing interviews with the people who designed the protocol helps me see their decision-making process at the time, and design better protocols today.
Also, the music used in the documentary is composed by Paul Slocum, who uses an Atari 2600 along with dot-matrix printers and other assorted 80's computer hardware in the composition of his music. Band website and random interview, along with Atari 2600 programming for more information.
Ehh..WTF?
The Zmodem protocol could reduce its block size automagically to deal with noisy lines (which reduced the amount of data in each packet resend), it had a resume feature so one could start a prematurely terminated download from the point it left off, and programs like Telemate had a nice way of displaying a batch status screen if one was downloading a large number of files in a single batch (it showed what percentage of the total download was completed as well as the percentage of each file as it was downloading).
There are a lot of FTP clients and browsers out there that could learn a thing or two about download status displays from those older DOS communications programs...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Hopefully this documentary will explain the mindset and culture of BBSs. They were like little special interest tribes with tight knit peer groups and a hierarchy of "ownership".
The internet dissipated the people who populated the BBSes because nobody was interested in the "small town" of the BBS when the "cosmopolitan big city" of the internet was available. Even a big service like COMPUSERVE eventually folded many of its forums and combined them in the mid 90s.
There's no going back, either. BBSes existed as they were for a confluence of technical and social reasons - because owning a computer, and being willing to connect it to an informal "network" in the 80s through the early 90s was kind of special.
BBSes compared to the internet are a lot like ham radio compared to CBers and cell phone users. One is niche, special, requires some technical chops, the other, any idiot can hop on (and usually does.)
Ahhh... Tradewars! I truly loved that game. I was quite addicted to it... even used to write my own software utilities to assist me with playing the game. Along with some shareware tools I invested in. I was a force to be reckoned with. When I couldn't find a decent local board to play it on, I started my own BBS. :)
I played many other "doors" off and on, but none came close to capturing my heart and attentions as Tradewars. EVER.
Those were the days, to be sure...
Until just a few weeks ago the place where I work was running a BBS (Glacticomm Major BBS) for collecting data from field techs who work out in the boonies where until recently Internet access was hard to get. All the bigwig IT folks were scared of it because their trade rags convince them that anything old is somehow evil. They just replaced it with a webby upload system (that makes me want to barf because it requires IE).
Personally I wouldn't mind seeing all 7 hours of this DVD set. I like to have all the little details and extras of something important and I think many slashdoters would too, but an abbreviated 2 hour or so version might be nice for the average joe especially if it were ever to come to TV.
Myself, I started off on a 1200 baud modem and helped run a BBS that ran off of a junked rewired 8-inch 40 meg hard drive attached to a PC/XT. Those were the days.
I could tell them about the chicks who dialed into my BBS who I said "Wanna fuck?" to, and actually showed up.
Incidentally, bring a blanket to the beach, that sand gets everywhere.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Mr. Scott has poured countless hours, days, hell years travelling, interviewing, taping, editing, and well, _documenting_ pieces of our past. Having seen some of the footage and talked with him about this project I think it's an enourmous task he has undertaken and its really really cool that there are people who feel this passionately about preserving our past. Anyone bitching about 7 hrs, should realize that its not meant to be taken in all at once. There are many seperate interviews and many share a theme, from Sysops, to coders, random users, hackers and anyone in between. So help him out, pre-order set and learn something about your past.
Hello,
I am a bit surprised to see all of the comments treating Bulletin Board Systems as if they no longer existed or were a thing of the past.
While they heyday of the BBS is over, they definitely do still exist. The USBBS list documents hundreds (thousands?) of BBS systems, most of which are available by telnet access these days.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Dexter is a good dog.
I received my first porn gif on BBS.
Let me hear ya'll scream Phoenix! Yeah! Mesa! Scottsdale! Yeah! Shout out to my homies out in Tempe. Seriously, though, at the time, during the 90's the Phoenix area had one of the largest local calling areas in the country and there were hundreds of BBSes to choose from. Renegade was very popular.
Mine's been up since 1983!
http://www.thekeep.net/ Come and play lord or Tele-arenaWell you had NAPLPS (more info & pics) which practically no one used (at least in the US) but did get some support from a few BBS packages and terminal programs.
Then there was RIP (aka RIPscript, pics) which got the most implementation, although the tools and actual BBS support were far behind what ANSI was capable of.
Then towards the end of the BBS era, you had Syncronet appear on the scene, which IIRC had ANSI and RIPScript support first, then added a custom terminal program with SVGA graphics. (not sure based on what presentation protocol, but I'm pretty sure it was proprietary) What's really interesting is it's been open sourced and is still in active development.
As a long time BBS operator (Xenogenesis BBS, Sysop HEX, 313 area, first running TAG software then Oblivion/2 which I'm listed as an author for although I never put out an "official release") I'd definately say ANSI was the standard. I still miss my Obv/2 setup and it's tight ANSI menu sets (all produced personally, I'd check out the scenes packs but made my own in TheDraw of course) and I'm hoping to put it up on the Internet someday from my backups.
Jonah Hex
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
I agree with many here... 7 hours is a LOT of time.
Why not also produce a second cut, that is closer to like and hour and a half, and have the 7 hours as the supplementary part... and include them both together. Hardcore people could see the 7 hour part, or if were interested in one aspect of the documentary, if the chapters were done right, find that expanded chapter and watch it.
Easy guys, I put my pants on one leg at a time. The difference is after I put on my pants I make gold records!
Bit rate is the number of bits transmitted per second (duh). Baud rate is the number of symbols transmitted per second (also called the symbol rate).
When one bit is transmitted per symbol (ie, BPSK), then the bitrate is the same as the baudrate. When two or more bits are transmitted per symbol (ie, QPSK, QAM, etc), then the baudrate is slower than the bitrate.
All of the digicomm engineers I have worked with avoid the term baudrate, and use symbol rate instead, to avoice confusion.
The Bell 103 modems (110 and 300 baud modems) used FSK, where two tones are used (one for 0 and one for 1), so the baudrate was the same as the bitrate.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
Geez, that's a bit overkill for a time period that is totally beyond the comprehension of most people that went there..
Nice idea though, but its bound to bore and confuse most of the target audience.
( and yes, im sure ill have a copy.. having been part of that crowd.. )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Excellent Risk-knockoff. I remember waiting for midnight so that I could be the first to log in and unleash my newly-adquired armies onto the other players.
Fun.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
lame. i submitted this 2 days ago, and it didn't get posted.
:(
ps: my apologies for trolling. it's not intentional; i'm just venting some steam anonymously.
Google cache of the Interview list
The interviewees of note for me are Mr. Wayne Bell of WIIV fame, and Mustang Software Employees, makers of QModem software which I used as a dialer/emulation program.
Oh, I remember the old days of BBSing. Really cool thing is that my old gang is still pretty close knit. We all ended up getting jobs at the same tech company, it was cool having 5-6 guys I knew so well at work. We have gone our seperate ways, but I do run into everyone from time to time. You cannot get a tech job in Orlando and swing a dead cat around Orlando without hitting someone you know.
About WWIV, my friend Grim restored a backup of his board onto his modern day computer. The mail sort which took hours on the original computer only took minutes. It was a purdy thing.
Yopu for you?
I ended up making a 1 meg .tiff and sticking it in the zip file, and my downloads increased significantly.
BTW the game made me a whopping $25 which as I promised in the shareware nag screen, went towards my college education... Ahh to be 15 again.
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
I proceeded to beg two Multitech acoustic coupler modems off my high school computer lab teacher, and lost a weekend to splicing a cable out of old solid phone wires and masking tape to hold the beast together. Strangely, Multitech was very patient with my youthful exuberance, and slowly read off the pins and where to connect them on my Apple IIgs.
The next few weeks were amazing. Proterm, a pal and I made our first call with a number gleaned from a cracked version of Hard Hat Mack. We logged in as 'new', frantically wrote down our name and password in a notebook that soon would be filled, and sat in wonder as words and animated \|/-\ cursors flew across our screen as fast as we could read.
Page after page of the notebook was filled with phone numbers, names and passwords, floppy after floppy were filled with blue box plans, docs for cracked games, directions on how to get revenge on geek-hating bullies and ASCII pinups.
Of course, whenever we saw a 'Contact Sysop' menu item, we frantically entered the '*', and was brought to the 'Enter your reason for chatting with the Sysop' page.
The chat textbox invariably looked like this:
WE KNOW YOU ARE THERE
WE KNOW YOU ARE WATCHING!!!
WHY DON'T YOU TALK TO US?!
WE KNOW YOUARE THERE!!!
The carefree BBS days came to an abrupt halt when the monthly phone bill arrived, and totaled over five hundred dollars. I was brought up on charges in front of Mom and Dad, and spent two weeks in a Juvenile Correctional Facility otherwise known as my room. My calls were thereafter contained to the Twin Cities, and there were far fewer in number as I was busy with chores designed to build character and break my spirit.
After this, my travels on the high seas and the vast treasures I accumulated! AYE! ARR!
This video is just in time for the VCF 7.0! http://slashdot.org/articles/04/10/18/040233.shtml ?tid=126&tid=137&tid=185&tid=1
Check it out: http://www.joeslife.info/
Interviewer: Would you mind describing yourself? /. Reader: Why? So that you can mine my personal information and sell it to SPAMMERS? F*ck you! .COM boom of the late 90s?
I: What are your interests in IT?
R: You moron. You typed this questionnaire in vi, right? Idiot, you can use emacs on FreeBSD and download much better fonts for free.
I: Ok. Do you find yourself a product of the
R: WTF? In the 90s I was working on my History Major and then I came across google in 2002 which showed me how to install Linux and put down all those M$ Windoze Lusers!
I: I give up!
R: That's the typical of the mass-media, portraying Open Source alternatives as hopeless and their user community as uncooperative. Shame on you, you probably never programmed anything in your damn life. For instance, I wrote a program this morning in quickbasic where two kats through carrots at predetermined angles and speeds. Try doing something creative like that you idiot. I'm 3l3373!
BELOW IS A RANDOM PIECE FROM THE SITE
May, 1992
Hayes Microcomputer Products announces the Smartmodem Optima Data and Fax Modem, capable of 14,400 bit/s. Retail Price: $519.
June 10, 1992
FBI agents descend on the home of Richard Kenadek in Millbury, MA to shut down his BBS, the Davy Jones Locker, for software piracy, seizing the BBS equipment. Two years later, Kenadek will be arrested, charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and sentenced to six months home detention and two years probation.
Published on June 11, 1992, Worcester Telegram & Gazette (MA)
FBI RAIDS MILLBURY HOME \ COPYRIGHT SOFTWARE ALLEGEDLY SOLD
MILLBURY - FBI agents yesterday raided the home of Richard Kenadek, 46 South Oxford St., owner of a company that had allegedly been illegally distributing copyrighted computer software programs, according to a software trade group.The Software Publishers Association said the FBI raided the Davy Jones Locker, "a sophisticated computer bulletin board with paying subscribers in 36 states and 11 foreign countries."FBI spokesman William McMullin confirmed agents executed a search warrant in Millbury....
Published on June 11, 1992, Boston Globe
FBI RAIDS COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARD GIVING OUT COPYRIGHTED SOFTWARE IS ALLEGED
In one of the first crackdowns of its kind, six FBI agents yesterday raided a computer bulletin board based in a Millbury home. Authorities said the bulletin board's operator had been illegally distributing copyrighted software.Executing a criminal search warrant, the agents seized several computers, six modems and a program called PC Board, which was used to run the bulletin board. Authorities also seized
Does someone have a mirror or torrent of this movie - the link in the article goes to a suspended account.
This from the website when you click "what will it sound like":
This Account Has Been Suspended
Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible.
So I'm guessing it's a whooshing noise, with the crinkle of paper bills clearly audible.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
Baud is not an acronym. iirc, It was the name of someone who did some early telecommunications work and he was honored by naming this unit after him. Kind of like Kelvin or Fahrenheit.
http://media.bbsdocumentary.com/photos/vidcaps/ind ex.html now gives people the following:
This Account Has Been Suspended
Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible.
Fun, huh ?!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Motion lotion
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Are they real DVD-videos, or are they CSS encrypted? (Seriously, I want to know; because I can't be bothered buying from peeps who can't be bothered making proper DVD videos, or want to try and stop me using their products after I've bought them, and I can't be bothered installing DeCSS.)
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
Falcon's Eye!
(yeah, it breaks the naming pattern, but it was by the same guys and largely the same game)
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Maybe "Fun" and "FAST" in that time really mean FUN and FAST !
:)
Connecting to 110 BAUD modem, seeing that one character at a time appears, was so... so... JUICY !
Now with 20 Mbit/s connection, yes, it's faster, but something is missing.
When 300 BAUD comes up, I salivated for it. Saved enough money for the modem, and still remember how my ear got pulled 2 inches longer because of that.
When 1500 BAUD arrived, my ear grew 2 more inches. When 2400 BAUD arrived, my ear lobe almost touched the floor.
Going from 2400 BAUD to 19.2 K took a long time for me - jobless at that time. Later on, quickly updated to 28.8K and then 52K.
Things are faster now, but heck, I still spent the same amount of time online - only do lesser and lesser.
At one time, I played 6 characters in 6 BBSes of the same league, and of course, I won. But didn't collect the $50 prize tho - donated it to the sysops, felt right that way.
Wow, what an experience !!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
When I was 10 years, old back in 1984, my dad had an 8088 XT and a 300 baud modem. I had an older friend who showed me how to connect to BBS' and find BBS' in my area. By the time I was around 12 years old I was Sysop of my own WWIV BBS. I paid the $25 to Wayne Bell to become a registered WWIV Sysop and legal owner of the WWIV C Source Code. I hacked that BBS up till no tomorrow. I made a ton of my own mods and learned tons of skills to make me be where I am today.
I think it's too bad what has become of "computer professionals" these days. I knew more about how a computer worked and what was really going on behind the scenes at 12 years old than lots of newly found Microsoft Windows MCSE graduates whom I have talked to. It appears that the average "computer professional" these days can get away with just knowning about troubleshooting the windows operating system and the flaws it has and not knowing one stitch of code in ANY language or how a computer really works. Very sad.
I wish that I had been foresighted enough, back in my C-64 days, to have invented Spam on the old Fidonet email network (remember Fidonet, boys and girls?)
(sigh)
I'd be a rich and hated man today, instead of just hated.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
What other game we played ?
:(
Gotta dig up my CD-R and check. I burned them into CD-R just before everything gone away.
But some of those things just couldn't be had no matter how I beg. Some of the authors preferred to let their product died then let someone else keep a copy of it.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I blame BBSing in high school for my current, lifelong addiction to "warez" and "pr0n".
Either way, I couldn't survive seven hours.
That'll make downloading the torrent of the movie feel like I'm getting it via 2400 baud modem!!!
1 gif = 5 minutes.
Sometimes it doesn't seem real that I was so impressed by diffused dithered greyscale images of "real pictures" on my PC.
There was no Internet, but there was a loyal Fido serving us.
:)
Still remember logging on to BBS, receiving the first New Year Celebration message on 9 AM, new year's eve. The guy sent it from Australia, already at night !
I replied to the message, and it arrived at his BBS 6 hours later, and he was STILL awake !
Yep, at least 2 guys hadn't had anything better to do during New Year's Day (in Australia) and New Year's Eve (in America) !
The feeling is gone now. No comeraderie anymore in the Net age.
One time I was pushed to become the temporary moderator for the FLAME group, and oh yeah, I was flamed to crisp ! For whatever's worth, it was fun, Fun, FUN !!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Does anyone still remember GBBS on Apple II, and its scripting language, quite an amazing piece of software engineering considering the limitations of the machines during that era. Along with ProTERM I would probably consider Greg Schaffer(sp) one of the best programmers for the Apple II during that time.
Interesting times those days, I remember saving my money for months, just to get an "HST" Modem...
I still have an entire collection of old programs in 5.12 inch, 360 K floppies !
And I have a working floppy drive that can read and write those floppy, to boot !
I've thrown away almost everything, but not the floppies, nor the drive. They matter to me. Really !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Jason Scott appears to have done a very good job with this documentary. Don't let the 7 hour number scare you, it is broken into 7 different parts that cover different things... For instance, there is 1 hour devoted to the underground scene and ansi art scene..
Once I saw the preview it did dawn on me how much there really was to cover. It seemed well presented, and probably STILL not complete!
From those that were around in the BBS days... Do you remember the Dual Standard HST craze? Telegard 2.5 and 2.7, FidoNet and crashmail... OOFNet and THG, ACiD and iCE, that horrible RIP graphics garbage... and of course the true community the local BBSes provided that is generally lacking with the global internet?
I saw the preview of the film @ Defcon, and also saw Jason speak @ 5th Hope about preserving media. It is interesting, as the project I tried to deliver to 5th hope was a video archive system --- collecting as much video content related to the underground computer world as possible, and delivering it on demand. Good news is the archive is growing -- bad news is there is still millions of news casts and other "reports" that I don't have... if anyone has old VHS/Beta tapes related to anything involving computers or telecom, please let me know. My last big milestone was the Whiz Kids tv series from 84! Also found Hack Attack, aired on Disc in 94... Very interesting stuff. Whiz Kids floored me, as the technologies exploited in this 1984 tv series were so ahead of their time, including Motorola MDT and DOT signs!! Crazy stuff.
Where was I, oh yes-- 7 x 1 hour documentaries , each covering a different aspect/portion of the BBS scene! Watching the preview, I wanted to immediately see the whole thing. I can't speak for everyone, but I personally have been eager for the release of his work. He also stated that in a year or two the cuts that hit the floor during editing will be given to the archive.org folks. Very very cool!
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
I ran BBS in Jeff and Rob's hometown for several years.
Icarus and Hemos online giving the ladies a hard time.
The good old days!
-Phoenix Master
...here's a free half hour TV show about BBSs, made all the way back when they were popular, which features CompuServe, Byte BBS and The Well.
This is a indepentantly produced film. He isn't experanced in the art of directting and was learning as he went along. Also, he doesn't have the Millions of dollars the big studios have. So, I would imagiane it would be and have a the feel of a indy film.
Plus, when is a Documentary fun to watch?
300 bauders? On the Internet? hehe.. Waaaay to slow for TCP/IP..
This film is indepentantly produced. He was learning about directting as he went along. There
wasn't a BIG Billion Dollar Studio backing him. So, this film is going to look and feel more like a indy film. He as spend thousands of dollars in his own money to make this film. There are several thousand BBS's stil in the world and most of the Sysop's would be interestted in viewing this film. Those of ya'll that are like 7 hours? Well, what documentary is not boring in the first place. I think with his experance and his efforts it is worth it.
G-String Divas was pretty fun to watch.
Don't think of it as a 7 hour movie. Think of it as a 7 minute movie .... downloaded at 110bps.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
300 bps modems (Bell 103 standard) did operate at 300 baud. Baud is an old school way of saying "symbols per second". 300 bps modems used one-bit frequency shift keying per symbol.
1200 bps modems (Bell 212A) operated at 600 baud but sent two bits per symbol using differential phase shift keying (DPSK).
2400 bps was 600 baud quadrature-amplitude modulation (QAM, in this case 4 bits per symbol), 9600 was 2400 baud QAM.
Recently, xlr8yourmac, had a piece on a 1980s BBS called the CommuniTree which had some interesting views moderators might enjoy (under "Fairwitness").
For those seeking to spend less than '7 hours' looking back at the BBS, I would suggest the main page from the above listing:
Hackers - The Missing BBS Files
It partially covers, TAP, MIT-ITS, PCNet-ABBS (run by John Gilmore), 8BBS, DFM-BBS (run by Jordan Hubbard), and the CommuniTree (run by the late Dean Gengle)...and these were some of the first, lesser known Bulletin Board Systems.
As someone else said, 'they [the bbs] were about the people.
There was an internet, if you were saavy enough to get onto it. Milnet had it's experimental days, and we had long cryptic numbers @ dot something dot something dot something dot com long before anyone knew what the hell an ampersand symbol was.
... very sad when someone attempts to do a complete history of the BBS, and completely neglects the New York underground scene.
PS - I'm quite surprised that - ahem - a good friend of mine - ahem had a bbs that was the conduit for all Commodore, Amiga and Atari ST games at the time in NYC
300 baud was great. I could read at 300 baud so screens would load at the perfect rate. Fortunately I was poor at the time so I couldn't spend too much time trying to download pictures from Rusty n Edie's BBS.
I even ran my own single line bbs on an Atari 800. Nothing but text files, really, mostly discussion of text adventure games. The Wolves Den, though that entry is wrong as it was in San Leandro and ran software I wrote myself.
Those were the days...if I knew then what I knew now I'd buy a lot of Microsoft stock.
BBSes is where it was at. How else was a 14yr old kid supposed to get pr0n without is mom finding out in the early 90's.
I really loved the ANSI pr0n too.
BTW last week while cleaning out some file cabinets I found a C64 300baud modem now all I need is the C64 to go with it.
In 15 years you will be snatching up the $50 slashdot 30 hour documentary...
Part 1... BSD is dead!
Part 2... Hot Griz in my pants
*sigh*
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
Apparently they suffer from a rather violent variety of the slashdot effect: bandwidth exceeded, account suspended. "Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible."
You could take all of the useful information that has ever been posted to a BBS, and make the film out of it.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Falcon's Eye was a million times better... different types of factions, the added strategies of people being put to work and buildings being built, and so on. Falcon's Eye was wonderful. A few of my friends and I still play it here.
I wrote an essay and contributed it to this project years ago. It's nice to see that the project is finished, and my essay might even be included on the DVD.
I'm getting a busy signal, slashdot style, This Account Has Been Suspended Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible. I better wait for one you guys to hang up then I will dial in again... On my BBS you could dial in at 300 or 1200/75 ...
I thought it was a lot better too, and it was the main one I played. However, it's clearly in the same line of games, with many of the same broad mechanics.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Wow. Doing the math, things really get put into perspective.
In 1994-5 I used to dial up the local "warez" cache at 300 baud and download a game filling the c64's 1541 floppy disk (one side) which was 180k. it generally took about an hour.
one BLOCK every 3 seconds or so so ~ 1/3 k a second.
One Hour = 180k
Now. With broadband, my speed is 3Mb. ~ 350k / sec or 10,000 times faster!
One Hour on the news groups = 1,290,240,000 k!
wow..
Karma means nothing to me, so suck it...
what... they didn't talk to me? I used BBSs!
-pyrrho
I'm trying to type that indignant sound Grandpa Simpson makes, but it's just not coming through as text.
I guess I'm stuck in a backwater of the distant past, in which I recall fondly that Baud referred to the number of times per second that the state of the signal changed (low to high, high to low transitions), and those few folks that had heard of it knew that Internet was a proper noun with a capital "I".
"symbols per second"
Stuff and nonsense, I tell you.
Putting moderation advice in your
What *is* the correct term for the "@" symbol?
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
It has a several-hundred-year-old history in commercial ledgers meaning "at", so is sometimes called the "commercial at", since it was almost never used anywhere else until recently. E.g. "55 bales @ $0.25 ea".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
So that's it? Some tv show is nearly ready?
I'd say that this is nearly news.
-- Watch the REAL Jon Katz.
Pre-order before Nov. 10 and you can submit a paragraph to be included on a file on one of the DVDs.
Will it be called README.TXT or FILE_ID.DIZ ?
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
Something to watch while you wait.
-------- In Soviet Russia, "Soviet Russia" sigs hate Slashdot.
Every hour you watch of this documentary will make another 10 years of your life awkward and sexless.
I'm thinking this goes on the back cover.
The trailers are awful. I can't imagine anyone shelling out FIFTY DOLLARS for this. Do they realize the kind of entertainment I can buy for fifty bucks? Damn, I can get The A-Team Season One.
Yea, I could buy one $50 crack whore blow job, or 50 $1.00 crack whore blow jobs.
I happen to be one of those folks who pre-ordered this DVD set as soon as I heard it was available.
Sure, this could be pared down to a 2 hour documentary, but my problem with that is - there's not a single competing product on the market covering anything about the BBS community! If we were talking about yet another documentary on "The Titanic" or "Egyptian pyramids" - I wouldn't bother with anything much over even 1 hour long. (And at that, it better offer an original viewpoint on the events.)
I invested over 10 years of my life in running the best possible BBS I could, including writing my own from scratch back in the days of the Tandy Color Computer. (It only had 2 pre-made BBS packages for it at the time, and I really didn't want a BBS that looked and felt just like the others.) After all that, 7 hours of coverage seems like relatively little.
This isn't really supposed to be "entertaining" for the masses. The people who will really get something out of it are the ones who were an active part of the BBS community, and remember first-hand all of the peculiarities that have long since gone by the wayside. (ANSI art coding groups, user validation phone calls, the progression of download protocols, experiments in graphical-based BBSs using protocols like RLE and RIP, various methods of handling inter-BBS emails and message forums, early multi-player online games, and much much more)
There is enough material there to make it's own DVD documentary on the pc strategic games bbs.
Funny stuff I remember : I paid 1000$ for a US Robotics 21 600 bauds to run my private BBS and some months after it some cheap 28 800 bauds modems were released... argh.... People were actualy waiting a lot to play some online games, most modems had only 1 line so you had to wait like 1 hour before getting the line.
(I fail as a nerd; I had to look up the name of the best sword...)
This Account Has Been Suspended Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible. Seems like he needed a 300 bauds modem to counter the Slashdot effect.
Sigh... I'm getting senile and going blind, I guess.
A dozen times today (I was busy, or it'd have been
many more!) I misread the headline as a 7-hour
history on the BBC.
When a majority of the /. crowd will sit through all 11 hours of LOTR: Extended Editions, but gets irked when presented with a documentary of their own early history that's a mere 7 hours, broken into easy to swallow 1 hr chunks...
I *lived* through the BBS era, and I am much the wiser for it... You yungins would do well to watch listen and learn...