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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."
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
I'm definitely a filmgeek.
Less is more.
70 minutes is always better than 7 hours
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.
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.
...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.
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
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.
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.
3 years in the making, and (at 300baud) 11.4 years in the downloading!
--
make install -not war
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
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!
Me too. I'm almost done downloading Windows 95. I hope there isn't an upgrade or anything to download after I get it installed.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
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
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..
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
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.
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.
Well 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
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))
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!
Motion lotion
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
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 !
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 !
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!
Baud is not an acronym. iirc
That is correct, baud is named after the inventor of Baudot Code, Émile Baudot.
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.
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)