I was too young to use BBS when it started but the topic fascinates me, especially after having read Hackers and The Innovators.
Not to hijack the topic, but has anyone watched the show Halt and Catch Fire (available on Netflix)? I'm curious how accurately that show captures the culture of that era.
I've gotten behind but what I've seen strikes me as reasonably accurate although I wonder to what degree later episodes are sort of overlaying a stereotype of today's silicon valley onto that era. I admittedly worked for a large east coast computer maker at the time but I think the overall busines culture even at smaller companies was a lot more buttoned down at the time.
The first season captured Comdex well enough to give me unwelcome flashbacks :-)
re: Halt and Catch Fire -- it's an enjoyable show, but the accuracy seems to get worse with each season. The latest season in particular had a lot of things that made me cringe.
I wish AMC had put the same effort into it as Mad Men, in terms of attempting to be an extremely accurate period piece. I suppose the viewership for HaCF didn't get large enough to warrant it, and/or the showrunners just aren't up to it?
As I wrote elsewhere, the first season felt pretty accurate to me. Perhaps arguably too accurate because they effectively painted themselves into the corner of making yet another IBM PC clone. (I initially thought they were going to go down the route of being a fictionalized Apple rather than a, somewhat, Compaq.)
But, yeah, what I've seen of more recent seasons feels more like aspects of Silicon Valley of 2015 startup culture meets 1980s tech.
That's fair, but when it first launched the network was putting a lot of marketing effort into portraying it that way. And I think in the first season that wasn't too far from the mark. So I'd argue more that the concept became different on that point over time, for better or worse.
I'm not sure I could point you to anything specific since I lived through it and never bothered to look, but there seems to be some alright stuff scattered on wikipedia. You can also learn a lot just downloading old ansi packs from http://sixteencolors.net/ and reading the news and info files in each pack.
The thing is, the history of that era is huge and has many parts. The BBS Documentary covers some of it, but IMO it has a lot of flaws and underwhelming segments given the subject matter. I personally know a few people who were in that video and I can say there's nothing inaccurate or bad about what they said, but I don't feel like Jason really "got" it that well. It's better than nothing and I appreciate it was made, but it's a bit ambitious and thus needs to gloss over things.
I'd probably look into reading about some of the following which relates some to the different parts of the BBS era:
* Music Scene - Trackers, MODs, S3M, XM, music groups, artists (Purple Motion, Doctor Awesome, etc.), Sound cards (AdLib, Roland, Sound Blaster), MIDI
* HAM Radio WRT to BBSs
* BBSs and the Internet - Mail gateways, usenet, IRC
* Phreaking - Captain Crunch, War Dialing, Boxes (blue, red, etc.), and more...
* Cracking - Mostly overlap with warez
* Emulation - Overlap with warez a lot, but there was a pretty interesting ROM dumping scene and early NES emulation scene starting
* Alternative Lit/Anarchy/Etc - Spreading this kind of stuff was really popular and most of it is now "illegal" per many laws in western countries. Most famous is Anarchist's Cookbook, the first version.
* Early Internet and versions thereof
* IRC, Usenet, Gopher, Archie, FTP, etc. is all interesting as some of those things rose and fell during these times
* Programming Languages - C, C++, Basic, Pascal, Smalltalk, Delphi, VB for a range of where some of the industry was going or didn't go. Obviously many more.
* Platforms/OS - IBM, Tandy, Amiga, C64, Atari ST, CP/M, Unix, HP/UX, Windows, Dos, DRDos, OS/2, OS/2 Warp, BeOs (later), Novell Netware, Apple II/Mac, Sparc, SGI (Irix), Desqview (used to run multi-node BBS sometimes) and many more.
* Law Enforcement Operations - Raids (ex: Steve Jackson Games), Busts, etc.
The above list is not meant to be comprehensive, just to guide you what articles, books, videos, and such that might turn up if you search for some of these things. It's a long road.
Regarding Halt and Catch Fire, I think there are things about it that ring true, but it's not so accurate. People get things done way too fast, act too much like we do today, and the office culture feels off to me. They really don't capture some of the more innovative cultures at various big companies of the time. Not even the more crazy ones like Atari's old office, though there are clear nods to companies if you pay attention. It'd be a long post to dissect it, but the short answer is no, but it's not like I experienced all there was to experience. It feels to me more like they took a lot of real things at the time, composited them together for story purposes, put on some 80s clothes, and otherwise threw things out the window. I do enjoy the show anyway though for even daring to touch that material.
Anyway, I hope that gets you started on a long, interesting path and I could add tons of more bullets to that list.
At risk of not adding much to your comment, this really rings true having been a teen when a lot of those names were big on the "scene". This definitely brought me down memory lane, and made me start thinking of finding some of my old local 2600 friends to see what they got up to over the years.
One thing I will add is that the energy and excitement was just so much more genuine and the passion was at a different level than today. I'm not saying there aren't extremely talented and energetic people these days - there are actually more simply due to the sheer size of the industry - but the density of them is far less. The self-selection filter was much stronger back then and while most folks were relatively well paid it wasn't mostly about chasing VC funds and hitting the next IPO. It was about "holy crap, I'm actually being paid to do things with computers!" - at least my tiny slice of the experience.
Things also were a lot more "simple" for lack of a better term. Today I'm not sure how I would have gotten my foot in the door and made myself minimally useful enough to start learning skills and gaining reputation (which then later led to a career) simply due to the sheer number of layers of abstraction on top of everything you have to punch through.
It was certainly a simpler and much wilder time though!
Not to hijack the topic, but has anyone watched the show Halt and Catch Fire (available on Netflix)? I'm curious how accurately that show captures the culture of that era.
Would love any additional reading recommendations around BBS' emergence as well. Already bookmarked the documentary series: https://archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary