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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."
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 just can't imagine there are many people who care enough about nerds dialing up bulletin boards to spend 7 hours watching them.
...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..."
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)
There are actually some people out there who like to get the whole story. While I won't be rushing out to buy this set on release day, I am sure my boss will snap it up. Then I'll borrow it from him and watch it. I am fairly young as far as computing goes, but I did start out with a couple of BBS's...how else was a 10 or 12 year old boy to download all the girlie pics he wanted to look at with good old Lview... Anyway, I think it'd be kinda neat to see all the stuff I missed by my parents not getting pregnant and having me in high school. THOSE were the days.
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".
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.
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.
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..
Play its successor now at http://www.lotgd.net/
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.
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!
Jonah Hex
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
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 !