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BBS Documentary Now Shipping
Prophetic_Truth writes "Jason Scott is now shipping his BBS Documentary, which consists of five and a half hours of episodes outlining the history of Bulletin Board Systems. On a personal note, I can't wait to get my preordered copy! I've been looking forward to this documentary more so than HHGTG and Star Wars ROTS."
It'd be fun to watch for the nostalgia value. Hordes of 80's greasy, long haired geeks with huge glasses (myself included
Trolling is a art,
Yay, Jason!
This flies in the face of science.
As a sysop of one of the oldest BBSes in the world, I spoke with Jason early on regarding the project. Unfortunately he wasn't able to make it down to interview me but I think it's great that this project has finally come to fruitition and wish him all the best. I also want to say Hey to everyone who hit the Dungeon BBS in the early days.
I ran a BBS on a commodore 64 with 4 1541's (which I had to crack open and solder to change the drive number) and an SFD drive which held an amazing 4066 blocks! I ran the BBS with C-Net software. All this and more before I was 15.. those were the days.
P.S. I had to Phreak with MCI codes to get the best cracked games from across the country to lure in users.
One of the last remaining BBSes: SDF-1
I'm a member. I'm seventeen years old. I missed the golden age of the BBS. I must watch this documentary.
"Screw slashdot." -- Linus Torvalds
You obviously never spent the better portion of your free time using Telix to connect to single or multi-line BBS.
I had the good fortune to grow up the son of the owners of a 50+ line BBS. IIRC, the most number of people I saw connected through the text interface was about 25. A lot of our lines were for SLIP users.
Ah, those were the days. I might have been an annoying as hell ten-year-old who liked to see how many exclamation marks he could put in one line, but it was still fun, and I still see some of same people on a weekly basis.
Alas, if I'd been born a bit sooner, I might have been able to enjoy it longer. The BBS I was on is still around, and you can log into it via telnet, but it's mostly used as a database to authenticate against for the dial-up portion of the ISP. For a few years(1999-2003), I was the phone tech. Then we sold the business to a family friend, who still runs it.
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I ran Maximus first and then RABBS and played with many others. At first I did straight DOS but then with WFWG 3.11 I could run the bbs in a dos window and do other things.
I also was a Fidonet hub for my small town and there were a lot of people who subscribed to that. I think I had nearly 300 users at it's peak.
Sometimes I think of putting one together on a old box.. Really cool if I had my old Tandy 486SX 25mhz PC to run it all off of it's 14.4 modem.
You're joking, but I heard this guy speak at HOPE and apart from his choice of shirts it was a great talk. He really knows what he's talking about and he's dedicated to the project; he mentioned having to use a flashbulb to read dot-matrix printouts of the first few months of posts on the first BBS because the ink had faded by now.
The talk ("Preserving Digital History") is availible here.
"For years, I struggled with reality... but I'm happy to say I finally won out over it." -- Elwood P. Dowd
Honestly, that sold me.
FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec
I was one of the people interviewed in this documentary. One of the things Jason always found interesting was that I was the one who at every phase of production was constantly reminding him that BBS's are not in any way a thing of the past. Dialup is dead, but BBS's live on. I haven't seen the final product yet, but I hope he's managed to convey this message successfully.
Those of us who still frequent BBS's know that it's still the best way to stay in touch with groups of people. BBS's are still home to some of the best online communities on the Internet, and now the BBS tradition is even providing an unconventional but surprisingly effective solution for groupware applications.
For those of you who aren't currently part of a BBS community, I'd strongly urge you to go out there, find one that you like, and make some friends. Log in every day. Keep the discussions going. The "modern" Internet has been trying (unsuccessfully) to re-create for a decade what the BBS has always provided. It's the people that matter most, and nothing connects people to each other better than a BBS.
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Hi, everyone. I find the best thing to do with Slashdot discussions if something you've done is the center of it is to wait out the initial wave, find the general questions people are asking about that they can be told without visiting the site, and answer as best I can. Obviously, the website itself has answers in more detail.
So here we go.
As most people figured out, it's a multi-episode collection, not a single documentary. That would be insane and pretty unwatchable. There are 8 episodes, covering everything from Fidonet to ANSI to hacking/phreaking BBSes to the BBS Industry (think Boardwatch, Mustang, Galacticomm, PC-Board, and so on). Each of these are of varying length from 20 to 40 minutes, and go into their own subjects with slightly different styles.
The documentary is subtitled. All of it. All episodes, all bonus footage, all easter eggs, you name it. Subtitled, period. I don't think it's right to put out a DVD that isn't. Some of these episodes have second or third subtitle tracks with 'non-technical' subtitles.
There are commentary or statements on pretty much all the episodes. There are easter eggs, as mentioned. There is a DVD-ROM with thousands of photographs and a few speeches I've given on history. There is a lot of stuff.
$50 is steep for some people, and not steep for others. I've now spent 10 percent of my life so far making this film, interviewed 205 people, travelled thousands of miles over years, and spent a year editing the resulting 250 hours down to the works on the DVD. I am asking, in return, $50.
Releasing the DVD as a Creative Commons work is less about encouraging people to "not pay" and more about treating my audience with respect. The thought of threatening people with jail because they shared copies of my movies absolutely revulses me. People will watch and pay or not watch and pay but it's a lot more important to me that they WATCH than anything else. If my story of making the production, my willingness to autograph any copies you buy, and the hard work I put into designing the packaging isn't sufficient to make it worth buying for you, so be it. I'd rather you at least heard what it had to say. Additionally, I encourage people who think I did the documentary "wrong" to use the documentary as source material and make a new one.
By the way, a lot of the raw footage will be released to the public under the same license. That will result in a body of work well into the dozens (and perhaps hundreds) of hours.
It was a nice surprise to see this documentary slashdotted by someone else before I had a chance to mention it. I am very touched. And a big thanks to everyone who has bought or is buying a copy. I appreciate that very much.