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?
Who the heck wants to watch a film about cork boards full of ads? What a bunch of weirdos.
Most of us spend hours and hours online every day as it is...now we are supposed to watch a 7 hour documentary about being online too? Trolling on /. would be more productive...
You won't hate yourself in the morning if you don't get up before noon.
They should market this as a form of birth control.
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.
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
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.
Wait for the 4 disc special extended edition DVD's.
300bps? That would have been luxury! Why back in my day, we used a 110baud Teletype ASR-33, uphill, in the snow, both ways, And We Liked It!
3 years in the making, and (at 300baud) 11.4 years in the downloading!
--
make install -not war
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
Everybody was trying to figure out out to send the files by courrier, or even pay for a plane ticket for hardcopies.
I would have driven to the nearest library or wifi hotspot myself.
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
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
It only lasts 7 hours if you download it at 300 baud. At 9600bps, it's only 13 minutes long.
Sometimes it's best to get to the point. Other times it's clearly not. Do you also find Cliff's Notes superior to the original texts?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Motion lotion
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Nothing like a good double cross where my younger brother (piddlepee) joined another team just so I could locate and hunt down not only his Imperial Starship, but also partners ship, his planet and their escape pods as well.
It was a glorious 2 hours of victory between 11pm to 1am of alternate dialup/login/tradewars cycles to achieve the victory.
Never played TW since then.
Funny thing is nearly 10 years later, I still have the dot-matrix printout of the final blows as their escape pods were destroyed.
Mooohahahah...... Madd Anthony got owned.
P.S. Some of the freeware/shareware Those mapping tools saved the day when figuring out what parts of space woudl allow the greatest amount of exploration immediately after a reset.
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
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.
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.