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

Ahhh... Usurper and LORD

[Drakonian]

Remember those days?

I'll be right back, I'm taking Violet upstairs.

The BBS

[doodlelogic]

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?

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.

History is great and all...

[DeepDarkSky]

...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..."

gah 7 hours..

[blackicye]

My best guess is 6 1/2 hours of the footage will be featuring the downloading of pr0n at 300bps.

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 :P

14k? Whippersnapper!

[name_already_taken]

Yes, and they will take forever to download at 14k!

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!