[HN Gopher] Enjoyed Jason Scott's BBS documentary
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Enjoyed Jason Scott's BBS documentary
Author : edward
Score : 78 points
Date : 2022-06-14 14:43 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (changelog.complete.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (changelog.complete.org)
| 01100011 wrote:
| I bought the DVDs a decade ago and enjoyed it but remembered
| thinking that it missed large parts of my experiences online
| between '87-'93. Still though, it's great and I recommend it.
| ghaff wrote:
| BBSs were a _very_ varied scene and experiences doubtless
| varied a huge amount. That 's true with online communities in
| general but the BBS scene may have been even more varied than
| most.
|
| Also even ten years ago, the heyday of BBSs was 20-25 years in
| the past. It's hard to reconstruct things from that relative
| distance. For example, I was looking at Boardwatch Magazine
| archives and what I find only goes back to about 1993 when a
| lot of BBSs were on the cusp of transitioning to ISPs.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yes. So much about the era is lost to the mists of time that
| Jason's documentary is really a valuable resource. I believe the
| full interviews are on the Internet Archive.
|
| It was sort of a parallel world to the Internet and because it
| was basically hobbyists rather than universities, government, and
| various companies it was never really systematically documented
| at the time. And a lot never made it to the web. Although there
| are various books that touch on the BBS scene in various ways,
| various text files which Jason has also archives, and one or two
| contemporaneous magazines, I'm not even aware of any real written
| history per se.
| trh0awayman wrote:
| I watched this about over a decade ago. It's a great documentary
| - I think they even interview Grandmaster Ratte in it.
|
| I highly recommend pairing watching this with reading Commodork:
| Sordid Tales from a BBS Junkie by Rob O'Hara. Those two items
| will transport you back into the golden age of the BBS...
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm going to grab a copy. I just noticed that when I was
| scanning to see what books there are about the BBS scene out
| there. The answer seems to be not much.
|
| ADDED: There's actually a brand new book that looks
| interesting: The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media.
| mynameishere wrote:
| For the casually interested, the most interesting part is the
| last one, on Arc vs Zip:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNXCd2EATSo
| gunnarde wrote:
| I stream old and new ansi packs in video form on twitch and
| YouTube. Https://www.twitch.tv/gunnard
| Https://www.youtube.com/gunnardengebreth
| gunnarde wrote:
| <https://www.twitch.tv/gunnard>
| <https://www.youtube.com/gunnardengebreth>
| gwbas1c wrote:
| When I finally got my hands on those disks I watched them back to
| back to back. That was one of the last times I stayed up until
| dawn on the weekend.
| petercooper wrote:
| He also did a documentary about text adventure games called "GET
| LAMP" which I enjoyed a lot:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhbcDzbGSU
| newobj wrote:
| Ran a BBS on my Laser 128EX (Apple 2 clone) as a teenager for a
| couple years. Modified DDBBS software, which was pretty good
| Apple 2 BBS software that included an RPG-like game built right
| into it (it wasn't a "door", your account WAS your character). I
| expanded the game; I think it was written in ACOS/MACOS like a
| lot of Apple 2 BBS software at the time. The original DDBBS
| author was Evan Molnar I think. Evan, are you on Hacker News now?
| :)
|
| Later I upgraded to something called FutureVision I believe,
| written in what was more or less the final bespoke Apple 2 BBS
| language, "METAL". At this point I was heading off to college and
| the internet was spinning up. I finally got a 486 too, so I could
| play Doom :P
|
| Running a BBS was so, so, so much fun. I'm still chasing that
| dragon to this day. It was weird to be the "head" of a community
| as a 16 year old introvert. My users were mostly adults. We had a
| meet up once that my parents barely even let me go to, and most
| people were shocked by my age. I think only old people, and me,
| were still using Apple 2's in the early 90's :P
| newobj wrote:
| Also, it's weird to think about users congregating based on
| computers, but between using special characters in the BBS
| software (PTSE), as well as having apple 2 "warez", Apple users
| did tend to cling together...
| jlundberg wrote:
| For more BBS-nostalgia with new releases as well, this ANSI and
| ascii art site is a great resource:
|
| https://16colo.rs/
| EricE wrote:
| Ahh, the good old BBS days. And just to add even more difficulty
| to the scene I decided to run a BBS on my Mac Plus - ha!
| Minor49er wrote:
| I love this documentary. Even though I hadn't grown up using
| BBSes, it reminded me a lot of when I used to use IRC and message
| boards since the people, their interactions, and the technology
| involved, share a lot of similarities.
| johng wrote:
| BBS's changed my life. It put me onto the path that I took. I
| wouldn't change it for the world. I've started and sold 5
| businesses with my business partner and am still in business with
| my business partner, whom I met on a BBS when I was around 14...
| he was 13. That was 30 years ago.
| technothrasher wrote:
| I too met a business partner when he called into my BBS in
| 1985, when I was 14. On our first venture, we sold a shareware
| door library
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door_(bulletin_board_system))
| written in Turbo Pascal. Such fun times. We're no longer
| business partners, but we're still best friends. 37 years later
| and its crazy to think our kids are now older than we were at
| the time.
|
| The only reason I was running a BBS was because my dad
| accidentally bought me the software for my Amiga, thinking it
| was terminal emulation software. I realized his mistake and
| thought, heck, since I've got the software...
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| I loved this documentary so much! I click on every post about it.
| Awesome to know that:
|
| > You can download the DVD images (with tons of extras) or watch
| just the episodes on Youtube following the links on the author's
| website.
|
| because it left me wanting more more more. Maybe some day Jason
| will post the original unedited interviews.
|
| Also really cool to see
|
| > The thing about BBSs is that they never actually died. Now I'm
| looking forward to watching the Back to the BBS documentary
| series about modern BBSs as well.
| redbonsai wrote:
| He did post them! They're available here:
| https://archive.org/details/bbs_documentary?tab=collection
| axiomdata316 wrote:
| I'm looking forward to watching this. I wonder if it talks about
| Spiderisland BBS Software. This was my very first piece of
| software that opened up how to connect using a modem to another
| computer. The developers were really friendly and often
| interacted with the users as well.
| nominusllc wrote:
| I miss the brief resurgence of BBS communities with
| Hotline/Carracho/KDX. It was a magical little era, from a tiny
| little niche, right around the time OSX was about to be released.
| Anybody remember Hotline?
| iseanstevens wrote:
| Hotline was such a great scene!
| rosenjcb wrote:
| Jason Scott's stuff is great. I particularly love his talk about
| his experience as a defendant in a 2 billion dollar lawsuit
| (completely frivolous).
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