HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

⬐ mike

Also available for download and streaming on archive.org: 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 and his blog is http://ascii.textfiles.com

⬐ 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

⬐ 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.

⬐ 300bps

I was right behind you in 1985 with a 300 baud Mitey Mo Modem on my Commodore 64.

The opportunities that my parents created for me when they saved money for months to get me that system are incalculable. It's one of my biggest struggles today - how do I provide the same level of opportunity to my three children that my parents provided to me?

⬐ 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.

⬐ 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.

⬐ tdicola

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

⬐ 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.

⬐ combray

This came out in 2005 not 2013, fyi.

⬐ 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...

⬐ 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.

⬐ 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.

⬐ 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.

⬐ brianstorms

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

⬐ 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...

⬐ Syssiphus

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

⬐ neuro

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

⬐ b3lvedere

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

⬐ rsync

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

⬐ 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.

⬐ 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.