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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."
Oh come on, they weren't that bad...
Without a proper flamewar, Anonymous was undecided on what shell to run.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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,
I used to co-run a small local board using QuickBBS. Those were the days!!! We used to play some multiplayer game...Trade Wars? Galaxy Wars? Galaxy Trade wars? Whatever it was, I would log in every night at midnight to play my turns. It was early nerd-dom...
Yay, Jason!
This flies in the face of science.
Can we download the torrent using kermet?
BBS's were my life. Most of my interaction with other people outside of school was using them.
Too bad that as of Monday Slashdot no longer allows the blind to post without the help of someone that can see, or we might hear from more of us. Fortunately I had a relative that was over that could type-in that damn code from the image.
Just why is Slashdot so anti-blind? Did some blind girl dump Taco?
It remains to be seen if uuencoded pirated versions will be seen on fidonet...
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.
A BBC documentary about what? I don't get it. There not even a title, or anyth. . .
Oh, nevermind.
I can't wait to get my BitTorrent copy!
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.
I figure any chick would be horny out of her mind after 45 minutes of 300 baud delight. This thing is good for six or seven hookups.
Whats a BBS?
telnet velvet.ath.cx
tHe sHacK! bBS (telnet://velvet.ath.cx)
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
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.
I know you meant that as a joke, but if you do download it somewhere and enjoy it, do the right thing a buy a copy on disc. This guy has done something really gutsy making his own documentary (it's not easy or cheap), and we should all be supporting his effort with our wallets. If we don't support the artists in our own community, they won't go out on a limb for us anymore.
</preaching>
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to search through wachovia.csv for a new credit card number.
The world's only surviving livewriter.
Back when I used my older brothers ATARI 1200XL and 1200baud modem my friend Matt posted my home phone number on a bunch of BBS reviews saying that I ran an awesome BBS that had 50+ MB of pirated games. My phone rang all day and at all hours of the night for a week. Everytime we picked up the phone it would give us the piercing modem squawk! My Mom was so pissed!
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.
Does this make him more geeky or less geeky?
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
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
But not the last. The Telnet BBS Guide lists about 100 active dial-up, and 400 Telnet BBS services.
yes.. $50 to watch something that someone put 3 years into. Why are you so cheap? This guy spent his own money to make this and it was obviously took a significant chunk of his time.. $50 is not that much when you think about the work he put into it.
Jason's been working on the documentary for four years.
This is an interview with Jason Scott at the beginning where he explains the goals and the reasons why he did it.
It's not quite the same, but for what it's worth there are still some BBS's operating that are available via Telnet. Check out here for a listing.
Absolutely, but just because you CAN do it, doesn't mean you SHOULD. If you watch the first hour and say "this isn't for me", then that's fine... but if you spend five hours of your time enjoying it... freely-distributable or not, you should consider paying for it. You're thinking of the "enforced" morals that Hollywood pushes... these are your basic citizen's morals, where you pay for what you enjoy because it's the right thing to do.
I'm not saying you NEED to pay for it, I'm saying you need to clear your mind of all the push-and-pull nonsense you're used to with movies and DVDs, and think of it as "you and this guy's documentary". Evaluate and proceed.
Most of us here are relatively well-off (we can afford video games and Sith screenings at midnight). If we don't start really supporting our own community (both in entertainment and software) we're going to relegate ourselves to hobbyist producers, rather than a professional alternative market. Here's someone who put his money where his mouth is, and we should strongly consider following suit.
The world's only surviving livewriter.
And this is precisely the reason why people should (myself included) support groups like 2600 (http://www.2600.com/ with their excellent Off The Hook show. Yes, you can download it, but shows like this (by hackers for hackers) deserve financial support more than the latest over-marketed, over-hyped, *wood "blockbuster".
The same applies to video games too. Why buy the latest generic release from EA, when you can buy some innovative, lovingly crafted, software from guys like Introversion (http://www.introversion.co.uk./
Support the niches and eventually, it will change the mainstream.
Contribute to the online videogame encyclopedia: GamerWiki
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.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
My setup was an IBM XT Clone, with 640k of ram, dual 5 1/4 inch 360k floppies, 2400bps modem, CGA (Crap Graphics Adapter), and about DOS3.1 to 3.3 in my heyday. I lived in a large city, and we had many local high-quality BBSes around, I was even a co-sysop for one of them. At the time, most BBSes could only handle one caller at a time, and they were often busy. A BBS session consisted of the terminal software going through the various BBS numbers and dialing them all over and over again until it got through.
Once you got on, you would check and respond to your messages, take your turn at any multiplayer games, and then download and upload files. Most had ratios - so you had to contribute as well - this was stricly enforced, so even before BBSes got sophisticated and called each other at night to sync up, files spread like wildfire.
I remember some kind of phone-scam system as well, where you could dial into a special BBS and it would allow you to dial long distance for free - it connected the call for you. I used it just a few times to check it out, using it to call BBSes in LA, I think...
Most BBSes had time limits as well, and some even had time banks - if you signed off early, you could deposit your time in a bank, where it would accumulate interest, allowing you to manage your time wisely and stay on longer.
I started off using Procom+, but switched to Telix. Telix was DesqView-aware, meaning it could actually multitask well. Most DOS console apps wrote directly to the "screen" for speed, but this would wreck the more primitive multitasking tools such as DoubleDos. Alternatively, some featured a "BIOS call" option, meaning they played nice with the screen at the expense of severe slowness. Telix was able to do both - being aware of the environment it was running in, it was able to write directly to the screen, while being aware of DesqView - hence, no botched up display and near full speed.
In those single-user days, if you were on a BBS or trying to get onto one, your PC was totally busy. DesqView changed all that for me.
I could actually download files with Telix while I played graphical games, though DesqView did suspend graphical apps when you switched out of them, at least the primitive ancient version I had...
dahlek (will you squirm when you are pecked
Yup, Slashdot is in a lineage of threaded discussion forums - including BBSes, Fidonet, CompuServe and Usenet - where, for better or worse, I've hung out for almost 20 years. The obvious downside is the timesink. But on the upside, I've learned a lot, I've often been entertained, and I've had a soapbox from which to make remarks that I sometimes felt were appreciated by others.
One advantage the old BBS forums had was their sense of community. The communities were often local, and even when they were international (as on CompuServe's forums) the number of active participants was small enough that you got to know many of the members' personalities, and to feel that you were known to others. On Slashdot, I must admit I don't have that awareness of individual identities, except for a couple editors. There are so many participants here, and so many articles I don't read, I just haven't noticed who "the regulars" are, and I don't feel like one myself.
On the other hand, the huge variety of posts on Slashdot produces more gems than the BBSes yielded. Quantity and quality tend to trump community.
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.