There are members of the cult who took the sacrifice to not follow the others to the comet and maintain the cult's presence and memory on the doomed Earth. They give interviews now and then.
I made the BBS Documentary (www.bbsdocumentary.com).
My goal had been to do a documentary on the BBS Experience, working from interviews with flexible friends and nearby folks, and then work up to the "Big Ones", the names who had been in my teenage mind when I ran a BBS, like Ward Christensen, Chuck Forsberg, Randy Suess, and others. But then I had someone from Chicago checking in to make sure I wasn't going to skip over the important parts the midwest had told in the story. So it was that a month into production, barely nailing down how I would fly post 9/11 with a studio worth of equipment, that I found myself at CACHE (Chicago Area Computer Hobbyist Exchange) and meeting Ward himself.
They say "Never meet your heroes." I think it's more accurate to say "Have the best heroes" or "Be the kind of person a hero would want to meet." Ward was warm, friendly, humble, and very, VERY accomodating to a first-time filmmaker. I appreciated, fundamentally, the boost that he gave me and my work, knowing I was sitting on hours of footage from The Guy.
There were many other The Guy and The Lady and The Groups for BBS: The Documentary, but Ward's humble-ness about his creation and what it did to the world was what made sure I never overhyped or added layers of drama on the work. Ward was amazing and I'll miss him.
I have a physical copy of your documentary, which I finally decided to buy probably a few months after it was no longer for sale (thank you ebay). It is a memory trip for me and I learn something new every rewatch. The BBS scene in the late 80s and early to mid 90s was amazing, and is something I miss -- though I dip my toe in telnet bbs'es from time to time to reminisce.
You've done great work Jason. I was cleaning my desk last week and came across your business card, which I probably got from you at some DefCon while buying one of your excellent productions. Keep up the great work!
Anyway, I'm sorry if some people are reading this hastily written blog entry to seem like the archive is taking credit for the process of discovery being done by people. The phrase likely does not mean definitely and perhaps I should have used a different word when I wrote the entry. But the fact remains that the wayback machine is the only place you can see the image in the context of its original website, and that is only happening because the archive is doing such a general crawl. That's all I wanted to get across, all hail the wayback machine, have a great day.
I found the article very interesting and didn’t for one second feel the author was ‘taking credit’ in any way. A few unreasonable critics are a good signal that you wrote something that was widely read and enjoyed. They’re not representative, they just comment a lot.
It wasn't needed this time but it would be great to have a fulltext (and binary!) and reverse image search of the internet archive. Often you know something about what you are searchng fore but have no clue about the location.
E.g. I'm interested of finding old installers of a particular type (identifyable by certain byte sequences) but they could have been hosted anywhere.
I guess this is not feasible with the current resources of the IA and if it did happen it would probably just result in them getting hammered with DMCA requests and other legal demands for content that the "owners" didn't even know was on the archive.
