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."

Comments

Being a filmgeek

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm definitely a filmgeek.

Less is more.

70 minutes is always better than 7 hours

7 hours???

[Pxtl]

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".

Re:7 hours???

[sunset]

Really. I authored and sysopped a BBS (the world's first Atari-based) way back when, but there's no way I'd sit through a 7-hour documentary on the stuff.

Editing

[njfuzzy]

It sounds like someone needs to learn a thing or two about editing.

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.

Re:Editing

[Jason Scott]

I chose Njfuzzy's response because it seemed to catch the most-posted concern about the BBS Documentary. However, for anyone not cruising this article at a "show me all comments from -1 upward", let me mention that an awful lot of people are posting concerns about the "7 hour documentary".

And, like a lot of people, njfuzzy took the time to post his concern without actually looking at the site in any depth.

The story and experience of the BBS stretches 25 years (if you don't count proto-BBSes like PLATO/Community Memory/etc., and I do). It involves literately millions of people, and thousands of folks who were pretty hard-core into it and what it represented. And among them, were many hundreds of people who affected a lot of lives and brought life online, and spent a lot of energy doing it.

Therefore, the problem I faced at the beginning of the production was similar to that of doing "Car: The Documentary". How would you fit in Henry Ford next to a description of kids who take rental cars and juice them up with nitrous kits to race? Well, you can't. Or, you could and everyone gets 30 second mentions. I consider that fare that really any production company can do on spec for any cable channel out there.

Therefore, I made a choice. Instead of constructing out of thin air a "story line" that would span this 25-year history, give very little detail, and basically just serve as a vague introduction to the story, I would instead split the story into parallel episodes, each focusing on a major aspect.

The thing is, really, any group or production house could do a light, somewhat accurate BBS Documentary. To do one with a lot of detail and accuracy would require a lot of energy and a lot of work from a quarter that wouldn't normally work that way. I decided to bridge that gap.

DVD, also, provides a perfect medium for this sort of work. With the ability to go to any episode, switch around to details you might have missed, and most importantly, the ability to digest everything at your own speed, the opportunity is there to take on a lot of subject that would not normally be considered "commercial".

Think of this. I have Ward Christensen's only video interview. Some will not care, and some will care very much. I am of the folks that care. There are a lot of subjects covered in this documentary, many dozens, which were otherwise going to disappear forever. That's why I did it. That's what drove me as I travelled thousands of miles and did hundreds of interviews. That's what will hopefully persist long after the last DVD is sold and my last breath: that this was an important point in human history.

This said, it was NOT edited as a series of interviews, one after another, on a dry subject. I don't think the subject is dry at all. On the other hand, it is not agog with jiggling breasts and explosions, and I would think that people seeking such fare will move down the aisle. I think, at the end of the day, I will br very proud of the final product, and people who know what they're getting into will find it very enjoyable.

And in many ways, really, 7 hours barely scratches the surface.

Whaa??

[dogbowl]

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??

Awesome way to preserve a lost bit of history

[Mean_Nishka]

Although some are complaining over the seven hour length, I for one think it's great to have as much recorded as possible. Sysops around the world did some amazing things in their spare time (often with most of their spare money) decades before the Internet was available to mortal humans.

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.

Re:What the!?

[nsillik]

Karma Whoring for the "Informative" tag are we?

RE: I'll watch it all, personally!

[King_TJ]

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)