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Hundreds of Hours of BBS Documentary Interviews
Jason Scott writes "Hi, this is Jason Scott, director of the BBS Documentary, a 4 year project to tell the story of the dial-up bulletin board systems of the 70s, 80s and 90s. The documentary's out, for sale, and is completely Creative Commons licensed. But like most documentaries, there's tons of stuff left on the cutting room floor. And that just won't do.
I'm happy to announce that I have partnered with archive.org to present what will be hundreds of hours of interviews online. The BBS Documentary Interview Collection will be extended edits of the 205 interviews I conducted, presented as video and audio files, along with ZIP archives of all the photos and supporting materials for that interview. And of course, every minute is Creative Commons licensed as well.
It's going to take me upwards of half a year to edit and upload the half-terabyte of files; I hope people watch a few hours here and there to get an even deeper knowledge of the history of the BBS, or maybe even make a documentary of their own."
I participated in the BBS "scene" for awhile, and one thing that I truly miss is the sense of community. I got to know several fellow BBS'ers, and many would hang out regularly outside of the computer realm. We even had a yearly cookout at a local park where dozens would show up from around the area. ... to the good'ol days... ...
I guess I was a bit of a late comer to the BBS scene. I started in 1990, and started running my own in 1994 (and it ran until 1997.) I do miss those days, though, everything was a lot more personal with everything being so localized. We used to arrange a lot of 2600 meetings on my BBS. I actually knew a large amount of my user base, at least as associates if not being pretty friendly with them.
rm -rf
Wow, it's great to hear that the BBS Docu's have been released. If there's one thing missing from the early years of Cyberia, it's a comprehensive look at the beginnings of what it meant to be online, and digital - especially with respect to the manufacture of digital personalities.
Now, it's all too common to read about "life online" - so much so, in fact, that where many of us have come from is often forgotten. Life in the digital - life that we all share - is not just life, but more a shared heritage & it's great that a glimpse of that heritage has been released... -d!
The best thing about BBSing was the games! Any fellow LORD or Usurper players out there? Can these be considered precursers to the MMORPG's of today?
Many hours wasted playing those darn text games...
I got nothin'
As I read the comments, I couldn't help but notice how similiar the system is to the old BBS days. Yes, we now have graphics all over, and thread organization, but the rudiments of that was there even back then. We had ASCII art, and especially ATASCII art for us Atari users. Most BBS's had some organization to the thread. Perhaps the biggest difference would be scope. Then, most BBS's were local. You made a local call and got on. The ones that were visited at greater distances tended to be Phreaker boards since one needed a way to call them without breaking the piggy bank. Now, we can reach blogs all around the world, with some exceptions. We also have greater scope in terms of interest. Most BBS material was the type that would interest those investing in the new technologies. A 300 baud modem was still an expensive toy when I got into it, and 1200 baud was way too pricey. One good thing about 300 baud was that you could read the messages as they passed by on the screen. Only thing I miss from the good old days was the sense of community that existed. This was also found on the internet until AOL let "them" On the Loose.
I remember the inside jokes - the burger summits - the friends and relationships.
Most of my oldest friends came from the BBS scene, I know couples that met on BBS's.........the BBS scene was more than the internet in its day. The internet is a global community - BBS's were a LOCAL community, which made things more personal - more friendly.
BBS's were the seed of many technologies we take for granted today - email networks, online chat, multithreaded communications servers, etc. Ever wondered where emoticons came from?
I remember running PCBoard on OS/2 (my last BBS), and being amazed I could run 4 phone lines on a 486 - I remember writing scripts, ANSI ART, shareware, freeware, chats, SYSOP break thru's - ah the memories.
Forgive the stream of consciousness - but viewing this flooded my head.
Thank you for the flash backs, and farewell to the BBS - you will be missed
Some of the tools I remember using were:
I'm sure there were many more programs, tools, and utilities that I used in the day, but somehow I lost the ZIP I made of my entire BBS when I closed it down. I really wish I still had it around!
Jason interviewed me, but I doubt my footage was included. My board was too small and not terribly noteworthy, though I was one of a very small group that ran 2AM-BBS software. (Kudos to Neil Clark, Chris Gorman, and Tom Vogel.) And DesqView (remember that??) to run two lines. Ah, Rivendell, I remember ye well. Jason worked very, very hard, at great personal cost, to try and document this lost phase of online community building. The internet has done to BBSes what the Interstate Highway system did to Route 66. In the immortal words of DeForest Kelley, "She's DEAD, Jim!"
Some days it's just not worth chewing through the restraints.
I started BBSing in 1985 with a 300 baud modem and Commodore ('commode') 64.
Things are much better now. I downloaded a game back in 1986 for the C64. It was 25K bytes in size and took 20 minutes to download. (It took almost that long to load from the Commodore 64 floppy disk drive.) Now I get downloads of old pop songs from Kazaa! in minutes.
To connect to a BBS outside of your local telephone dialing zone, you had to pay long distance fees; high long-distance fees - by the minute. Now you can connect to anyone on earth with an e-mail address for free.
The sense of community generated by the BBS network is found now in specialized Yahoo! Groups. And they're free. You don't need hundreds of dollars of specialized equipment or hundreds of hours of training to establish and maintain them.
Even intercontinental telephone calls are free when using Skype or some other VoiP. Not long ago (within my lifetime), intercontinental messaging was $1 a word.
Massive personal file-sharing services similar to FTP is available freely now from Yahoo! Geocities. Want to share a file with anyone that has a downloadable internet connection? Put it on your free Geocities website. I do this with the data sheets of specialized old integrated circuits that I buy and sell on Bay and schematics of guitar effects that map out.
Did I say eBay? Global near-free auctions of the most specialized items imaginable. Find a buyer for anything. PayPal handles the always sticky financial arrangements at a reasonable charge, even currency conversions. I've even sold guitar effects boxes to people who don't speak English. I sold an MXR Phase 90 to a guitarist in Italy and all e-mail communications went through the SysTran on-line translator between Italian and English. A micro transaction between individuals on the opposite sides of the world who don't speak a common language. But we both had a high number of 100% positive feedback eBay ratings, a communications channel, a translation service, and a common financial entity.
Things are definitely getting better as a result of the global communications revolution. All this would have been science fiction when BBS networking started 25 years ago. Now it's beginning to become commonplace.
Tell us of your experiences.
Paul Slocum is the fuckin' MAN.
When I asked for more music on top of the mass he had available for download, he was unable to make the time because he was hard at work making a 64k bank-switched Atari 2600 RPG. You could buy an ocean liner on that much geek cred.
People hear his work as the "theme song" of the BBS Documentary; the music was created by hooking a microphone to a dot-matrix printer with a hacked ROM.
I'm privileged to be in any way associated with him.
The ANSI scene was HUGE. ACID, CIA, i could go on. Wonder where people like Trident(CIA?) and Beastie(ACID) are these days... Trident ran Muerte, Beastie ran Channel Zer0 out of Texas.
Actually, Channel Zer0 BBS was the ACiD western headquarters and operated out of Orange County, California. Beastie is now an executive at major storage and digital imaging corporation. I cannot personally speak for Trident, but Napalm, the last person to lead CIA, is a graphics designer for a large cable television network and creates his own tshirts and toys under the brand names Dead Zebra and Creatures in my Head.