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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."
The irony is... Back in the day (when BBS were most popular), one interview would have taken weeks to download. The comp geeks were runnin on Amiga's or Vic-20's with a 300baud Hayes modem.
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
Wanna come back to my place and check out a BBS documentary?
Congratulations to Jason Scott for this amazing accomplishment. There is a lot of history and nostalgia in his documentary that would have been lost otherwise.
$7.95/mo, 200 GB disk, 2TBxfer, MySQL, PHP, RoR.
You're not uploading them to a BBS too are you?
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 an ex-sysop, I wonder occasionally how a modern chatter would do on an old style BBS.
/+ops ....
WWIV-Menu>
==SYSOP Chat Mode Activated==
Sysop: Hey, i need to take the bbs off for a minute to get fido.
User: asl?
Sysop: It'll just be down for a few minutes, call back later, ok?
User: wtf hax?
Sysop: Sorry, I don't understand what you're saying. I've got to reboot too, so I'm going to disconnect you.
User: omfg hax, wtf is tis, spiware? a55h013!
Sysop: Do you require medical assistance? I've got your address on record from the age-check, would you like me to call a medic?
User: roflroflflfoolol who r u
Sysop: If you're having a seizure, don't worry, the ambulance will be there soon. I'm on my parent's phone line right now.
User: wqho are u????
Sysop: I'm the sysop of this BBS. Can you breath?
User: +OPS!!!!!!
Sysop: The 911 operator wants me to stay in chat with you until the medics get there.
User: stfu, how do I gt ops???
Sysop: Er, you don't.
User: dudez you got ops, why not for me?
Sysop: Actually, I own the computer you're on.
User: fu lier, gimme ops or I'll hack u
Sysop:
User: wtf is ur ip address, l33t hax coming
Sysop: What is an ip address?
User: brb, police
)@(*#)@#
NO CARRIER
Sysop: What just happened?
=SCHEDULED TASK: Fido connection starting...==
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
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Can't be a leech all your life. Gotta keep that quota up.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
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!
telnet lord.nuklear.org 10240
Their website is here: http://lord.nuklear.org/
When I watched that 10+ hour documentary, I just sorta assumed they included every remotely interesting thing they had, otherwise you'd have a 3-hour series along the lines of Triumph of the Nerds. I mean, heck, Cringely managed to condense the history of the personal computer up until 1995 into a three-episode miniseries, right?
After seeing that there's actually 200+ hours of footage, I can understand how they'd be reluctant to cut it down past 10 hours. Still, I think they could've cut down on some of the boring politics and still gotten a few hours out of it without omitting anything important.
Still an immensely interesting documentary, and if you've got nothing to do for a week, I recommend watching it. I watched it in a two-day binge, but then I really should have been doing something else.
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 used to run a Wildcat BBS (and a Renegade BBS actually) back in the day and was just thinking about how slow everything was. I remember sitting there waiting for the busy signal to go away on the popular BBS' so I could get in, play some usurper and download Kathy Ireland pictures. And when I gave it a little thought, that busy signal is really the same as the slashdot effect... just 15 years earlier or so.
Finance tutorials and more! Understandfinance
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.
Link to pay for the documentary.
http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/order/
Hacker Media
This is a documentary. Does anyone want to argue that a healthy share of disk space on BBS systems wasn't devoted to "dirty" pictures? Does the documentary not mention that? I'd think it was worth at least some acknowledgement. It's, um, the truth?
The episode entitled "Make it Pay" covers some of the aspects of how dirty pictures represented an easy way to make fast cash on BBSes, accompanied by a few dozen advertisements I found for "adult" BBSes, and reactions by some people to this fact.
That said, though, I also felt a few twinges of frustration during portions of the documentary. Probably my biggest "problem" with it was the segment on the ANSI artwork. It seemed like an extrordinary large amount of time was given to interviewing a bunch of younger kids who got in only on the "tail end" of the whole BBS scene, and mistakenly believed their "art groups" held much more significance than they really did in the "grand scheme".
.... and to me, they were roughly equivalent to "script kiddies" and "warez junkies" anyway.
One of the advantages of the size of the DVD set (3 DVDs, 5 and a half hours) was that I could afford to put in episodes or sections dealing with subjects that a shorter documentary (or a single-epsiode one) wouldn't have any way to put in.
Your complaint about going in too deeply on a subject that you yourself do not afford much respect to, is one that echoes here and there with basically all the episodes (except BAUD, which covers the creation of the BBS and people who buy the documentary expect this to be covered).
Fidonet and Artscene, because they're "out there", covering a very specific subject very distinctly, get very passioned positive and negative responses. Naturally, I have been criticized about how the ARTSCENE episode didn't get in-depth enough! And the FIDONET episode is a "best I could do" capturing of an impossibly-large event/movement. You strike at the heart of what I think is one of the real core strengths of the documentary being episodic; some episodes will appeal to different folks, just like BBSes. Imagine if I made it ONE EPISODE.
I mean, when I hit "play" on that portion of the DVD, I was hoping to hear interviews with the creators of the first ANSI art software packages like "The Draw" and "ANSIPaint", and/or more time given to the individual artists who first started offering to make free opening ANSI screens for BBSs around the country. They did talk to "Ebony Eyes" who was another famous ANSI artist from around that time, so that was good. But then the interview immedialtey shifted to this big "story" of the competing art groups like ACiD
Ian Davis, creator of "The Draw", is not interesting in discussing or acknowledging his work. I attempted to contact him through third parties who had interviewed him in the past about this subject (and who had great difficulty in even getting him to admit he was "that" Ian Davis). No luck. The creator of ANSI Paint is Drew Olbrich, who worked, interestingly, on "Shrek" and a number of PDI movies; he was supportive of the project but not interested in an interview.
Ebony Eyes was hard to get a hold of as well; she has gone on to a successful career in magazine publishing and has to deal with a constant stream of "media people" trying to get her time. I was lucky and privileged to get time with her to discuss events of a decade and a half earler.
Are you implying that after 1990, the story is "over" and should no longer be discussed? I don't agree, and I like to think the other hours in the films that do cover earlier time periods hold their own.
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.
call these new BBS documentary parts PODCASTS!
(Slaps Forehead)
thanks for the spam Jason! your pc-american centric CRAP documentary is spammed on slashdot, months after its failing release. you blow! -- Anonymous Coward
Don't make me regret the boxes are already printed; that would've gone great on the front cover.
He's gonna get a lot of file points for this.
http://www.bradsucks.net/
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.