
BBS the Documentary (2013) [video] - tambourine_man
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJgRHYw9-fU
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dantheman
This is a great documentary. Jason Scott, is really doing a huge service to
help document the history of computing. He's working on 3 other documentaries
and works at archive.org. I recommend following him on twitter, there's always
things people can do to help to preserve the special time we're living in.

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rsync
Run, don't walk, to buy/watch/download the BBS Documentary. It is truly
fantastic.

My favorite parts are the fidonet interviews - really fascinating and
technically interesting.

Thank you, Jason.

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mike
Also available for download and streaming on archive.org:
[https://archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary](https://archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary)
(the documentary is released under Creative Commons BY-SA)

~~~
cbd1984
Jason Scott works for archive.org now, BTW.

His main site is [http://www.textfiles.com](http://www.textfiles.com) and his
blog is [http://ascii.textfiles.com](http://ascii.textfiles.com)

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mmccaff
I remember daydreaming about how one day "running a BBS" would become
mainstream. It just seemed to make sense that a day would come when almost
every entity (person, business, etc) would have their own BBS, as they do a
voice phone number. The WWW is not far from that.

It really was a special time. Some early 90s BBS-related memories for me:

* Getting my own phone number so that I could run a BBS.

* Buying an external US Robotics modem at a 50% discount in return for advertising for them on my BBS.

* Getting a donation to pay for that from a member of my BBS.

* Not being very good at ANSI art, but spending lots of time in TheDraw, and joining an "art group" anyway.

* Trading BBS source codes and feature snippets with local developers and late nights hacking on the C code of my BBS.

* Switching to the OS/2 operating system and introducing a multi-node feature; so that I could login to my BBS at the same time as members.

* Getting cassette tapes for a lot of music I had not heard before from local BBSers.

* Tracking my time in a notebook for my "LD calls" .. so that I would not go over my "budget" for calling Long Distance.

Good times.

~~~
tracker1
I think some of my fondness was that communities on bulletin boards were
local... you don't tend to get that online, and they tend to be centered
around interest not location.

Interesting thing on LD calls, a friend of mine had a disagreement with the
person that ran one of the support networks for a BBS software, and had his
node/bbs removed from the network, so my friend got permission from the author
of the software in question, and dialed into the author's BBS in order to
continue participating in the support network... "they aren't going to kick my
board off," was the comment the author made.

The early-mid 90's was definitely a fun time... then things tended to migrate
to icq and irc... then a lot of it died off. There's still some art released,
not as frequently, but you should check out sixteencolors.net which has most
of the scene packs ever released... the archive is on github, if one wants to
snag the entire thing.

[https://github.com/sixteencolors/sixteencolors-
archive](https://github.com/sixteencolors/sixteencolors-archive)

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baldfat
I got my first 300 baud modem in 1983. It was life changing. The world that
was opened to a kid in Jr High was amazing. It was the Wild Wild West. I had
gargage bags of floppy disk of games and would trade with people in UK.
Learned how to hack in Assembly for my C-64. Saw criminals who stole credit
cards for tens of thousands of dollars get caught and than hired by
Compuserve. Had two brothers who I did game trading with get arrested because
they stubled upon a military (Pentagon) server when randomly dialing looking
for servers (That was a lot of fun in the day) it was a mystery and the /help
or /? would almost always get you in.

My Uncle even got me some security work at 15 years of age. The face he made
when I broke into his unhackable system (Basically you logged into the server
than it hung up on you and called back the phone number that the user name was
tied to) To bad you still had to have a root for everything to work and there
were HUGE holes in almost everything out there at its time.

PS CompuServer was the WORST and never understand how they survived for so
long. BBS was the best system ever except for the horrible busy signal because
someone was signed on.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
>BBS was the best system ever except for the horrible busy signal because
someone was signed on.

By the mid-80s multi-line BBS's were supported, the question is whether the
operator could afford them. When I was a kid I was dialing into a multi-line
chat BBS in the Chicago suburbs. I also dialed into a few traditional BBS's
that had 2-4 lines. The BBS revolution was ultimately self-limited. Phone
lines were very expensive and that limited who could call you and how many
users you could support. It was tough to monetize BBS's as everyone just kept
redialing the free ones as opposed to busy-free access to the paid ones (sound
familiar?) BBS's were a stop gap measure until we could get real digital
connections to the home.

Its incredible how the phone monopoly never really understood this outside of
super-expensive and super-slow ISDN. Why we didn't have a DSL-like product in
the mid to late 80s is beyond me. The demand certainly was there as geeks and
businesses were butting their heads on POTS limitations by then. I guess
that's just how phone monopolies work. In my neck of the woods the first
available broadband wasn't DSL. It was Comcast cable. For all the shit cable
providers get, in the early days, they helped keep the phone monopolies
honest. The same way google fiber is keeping them honest today and how 2gbps
Comcast service is keeping AT&T gigapower honest, etc.

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alexgartrell
Jason Scott (creator of this documentary) is fantastic. I highly recommend all
of his talks on YouTube. He also did the defcon documentary which was pretty
good.

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tdicola
Fantastic film that's definitely worth a watch. I can't wait to see Jason's in
development 6502 processor documentary!

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bane
Such an amazing documentary with people I can't believe were tracked down for
this. Amazing work and lots of memories. The whole thing feels like a slow
moving train wreck since you know what happens in the end.

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combray
This came out in 2005 not 2013, fyi.

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sengork
Understanding the internet indirectly involves understanding the BBS. Even if
you didn't use the BBS this documentary is very informative. What I found
intriguing is the sense of community BBS had (and has after it's demise),
something that is quite disjoint on the internet...

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ghaff
One of the factors in play with the BBS world that never really came into play
with the Internet/Usenet was physical locality because of the price of long
distance calls. In many cases, if you belonged to a BBS (to get access to
unpublished numbers and other benefits), the nexus was somewhere physically
nearby. In my case, for a number of years I got together with various regulars
from Channel One which was a relatively large BBS in Cambridge, MA.

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nasalgoat
This doc prominently features a very close friend of mine, Jeff Chapman, who
also went on to some acclaim as a vocal supporter of the Urban Exploration
community as "Ninjalicious".

Sadly he passed away due to cancer a decade ago, but I enjoy re-living the
good old days watching him talk about BBSing in this documentary.

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agumonkey
This video has a very high Kay factor. I love to see telegraph operator being
the human gears of a prehistoric twitter. BTW the PLATO project seems like a
Khan Academy forgotten ancestor.

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brianstorms
The very last thing that the PLATO is is an ancestor of Khan Academy.

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aphrax
there's a good section that features Bruce Fancher (Dead Lord) which touches
on Patrick Kroupa (Lord Digital) both are from Legion of Doom. If you get
chance read up about both - very interesting for similar and differing
reasons...

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Syssiphus
Is that the Legion of Doom from the book Masters of Deception?

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neuro
Yes, that's them. Also, Mindvox competed with Panix, that's where Phiber Optik
was from.

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b3lvedere
Great series. Especially liked the interview(s) with Tom Jennings.

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rsync
Yes, the fidonet sections with Jennings are my favorite part.

