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Hundreds of Hours of BBS Documentary Interviews

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the come-look-at-your-stuff dept.

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."

5 of 215 comments (clear)

  1. Ahh.. BBS's by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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... ...

  2. BBS scene memoirs by dlZ · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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 ./evidence @ punkcomp
  3. Ethnography of BBSers... by davecrusoe · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!

  4. The Games! by StarvingSE · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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'
  5. I ran a BBS for about 10 years by Dejohn · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Those were great days. My BBS never got that large - the most calls it ever handled in one day was 20 and I only had one line. I ran it off of a 286 with a 40mb hard drive for a while and later moved it to a 486 with a 4-disc CD tower. I learned tons about batch files and modem initialization strings in those days!

    Some of the tools I remember using were:

    • TheDraw - an ANSI graphics editor
    • BinkleyTerm - the Fido/File net front end mailer
    • RoboBoard FX
    • Shotgun BBS - written by Brent Shellenberg right near the end of the BBS days, but this was definitely a great BBS software
    • There was also Renegade, which was free and had some nice features. MajorBBS I goofed around with for a while but it was the most "commercial" of them all and expensive, if I recall. I'm sure there were others that I used too...
    • Fileecho - a tool to enable transfer of files between BBSes
    • Anyone remember RIP graphics?
    • I can't remember the name of the small app I used as a local news/fido reader...
    • Telex - one of the nicest dialers/terminal programs
    • Then of course I remember all the door games... LORD, BRE, Usurper among many others. Later, there were also caller ID doors and other callback verification devices to ensure the correct number was given. Even later, there were telnet and Slirp doors for SLIP connections to the internet.

    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!