BBSs in movies and TV? reddit / bbs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ReicientNomen · 2019-12-22 23:56 For as popular as BBSs were back in the day, I can’t remember even a passing mention of BBSs or BBSsing in general in fiction. During the personal computer revolution there were several contemporary works featuring or mentioning computers and even modems. Other than the occasional mention of BBSs in news and computer shows, I can’t think of anything in fiction. Does anyone remember even a passing mention of BBSs in movies, TV, or even in books and comics? Was the general, non computer savvy population never aware of it? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- samalex01 · 2019-12-23 01:13 I remember one of the crime shows mentioning a BBS like NYPD Blue or something. Also there was an episode of Silver Spoons where Ricky called a BBS with a Tandy Color Computer II and ended up in a military system. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- spentmiles · 2019-12-23 01:30 That was always happening to my TRS-80 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- iheartbaconsalt · 2019-12-23 01:50 I just imagine some sitcom with an old guy chain smoking, showing his grandkids his trashy Packard Bell, hookin' up to some BBS to....nope, can't even imagine it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ebola_flakes_II · 2019-12-23 01:57 I recall, running a relatively popular bbs in the early-mid 90's, that no friends that I didn't make through bbs's really had any idea what they were... So very different than present times. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- vga256 · 2019-12-23 02:36 Off the top of my head... There's *Wargames* of course - it does feature BBSes in the first act of the movie. They are more likely terminal servers, but at least have a BBS look to them. And there's [*Underground: The Julian Assange Story*](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2357453/) which has some nice C64 BBSing throughout. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2019-12-23 02:43 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ReicientNomen · 2019-12-23 02:56 To me, War Games always seemed to hint to a whole genre of hacker movies that never materialized in a satisfactory way. Maybe it’s because it’s the only one that didn’t suck, although I feel that if it wasn’t for Matthew Broderick’s pre-Ferris Bueller boyish charm to sell it, it could’ve been another forgotten hammy 80s film. Kinda like if they’d have released Back to The Future with Eric Stoltz instead of Michael J. Fox. I’ve always wanted to see the kind of young adult adventure/underground scene kind of movie that *Underground: The Julian Assange Story* would’ve been if it wasn’t loosely based on embellished fact. If only Assange wasn’t such an insufferable little prick. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ReicientNomen · 2019-12-23 03:07 To me, I guess part of the nostalgia for BBSsing comes from that brief time before online culture was completely homogenized by the modern Internet, back when content had to be curated and online anonymity was more believable. There was this sort of adventurous charm to going online that was lost when connectivity became ubiquitous, sort of like what happened to air travel. My first brush with BBSs was when my family got our first computer, and my older brother was starting college. He introduced me to the local BBS scene, and on a visit to his college, he took me to the terminal room and showed me around BITNET. It was fun. I guess I was looking for something that captured this feeling, but alas, it doesn’t exist. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ReicientNomen · 2019-12-23 03:10 Didn’t you just hate when the FBI came knocking? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ReicientNomen · 2019-12-23 03:12 Maybe in a Very Special Episode about uncle touchy’s basement, or a Law & Order SVU episode. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- iheartbaconsalt · 2019-12-23 04:29 It's just slightly too old for the SVU's and stuff..why didn't Punky Brewster ever BBS? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ReicientNomen · 2019-12-23 04:42 Maybe she would have, if she hadn’t suffocated inside that old refrigerator. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PotentialDeadbeat · 2019-12-23 04:47 Though not really what OP asked about, I couldn't help but share the link for the [http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/](http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/), it was a journey itself. There was a 1984 book about early computing, hacking and phreaking by Stephen Levy called Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, it was my favorite read. Not specific to BBS, but captures the culture of the time. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- iheartbaconsalt · 2019-12-23 04:56 NOoooooooooooooo! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ReicientNomen · 2019-12-23 05:10 The BBS documentary is one of my favourites! I’ve watched it countless times already, and it’s heavily recommended to anyone who hasn’t seen it yet! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SqualorTrawler · 2019-12-23 07:22 > because it’s the only one that didn’t suck Have you seen [23](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0126765/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2)? [Not a BBS but a Commodore SX-64 connecting to something it probably shouldn't.](https://i.imgur.com/dLsQc92.png) [Possibly a BBS here, at the Chaos Computer Congress scene](https://i.imgur.com/vW2mfEk.png). Note the coupler. Could be a BBS...maybe. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jdavidramsey · 2019-12-23 07:52 Carol Seaver, the teenage daughter in Growing Pains, wanted a modem to call BBSes in one of the Christmas episodes of the show. There was also an episode of Law & Order in which the detectives leaned on a SysOp for information on a user, threatening to arrest him for his user's illegal actions unless he gave them the information he was trying to protect. The Law & Order episode is probably the most direct BBS element I can remember in any TV show of the time. In more recent times, I believe the son in The Americans was shown using BBSes on a Commodore 64 several times. The show is about a family in 1980s America whose parents, unbeknownst even to the kids, are actually Soviet spies. It does an *amazing* job creating a sense of the 1980s. Another recent show with portrayals of BBSes and early online services is Halt and Catch Fire, also mostly set in the 80s. I watched the whole series, but never rewatched it, so I can't really give any more concrete examples. However, one whole season's story arc was about the creation of an online service that seemed to be based on the story of PlayNET/Quantum Link (forerunners to AOL), especially the PlayNET part of that history. (PlayNET was a graphical-based online world for playing games online as well as interacting socially in-world.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SqualorTrawler · 2019-12-23 07:57 No and this is one of the fundamental differences between then and today: there was definitely a feeling of "underground" when it came to BBS systems; even the square ones -- people had no idea what you were talking about until the late 80s at the earliest, or the early 90s. Very little is underground online anymore. Specific resources, perhaps, but hacking, carding, drugs, dark pornography -- people know they're out there and you can get to them with an Internet-connected device. And when I say "no," I mean I actively look for and collect video footage from old television, and old movies, dealing with computers. I don't know why I obsess on it but I do. One of my favorite old-school computer-related things is a Hawaii Five-O episode - S07E23 - The Computer Killer. This is from 1975 and worth a watch. This has shots of a guy - the antagonist, doing a remote session via modem...from a car, using some kind of wireless radio phone and acoustic coupler. He uses an [ADDS Envoy portable terminal](https://retrocomputingforum.com/t/adds-envoy-traveling- terminals/594) (kind of a sex bomb, isn't it?), and the computer screens are - kind of unusually for the era - not simulated. They used an actual terminal screen: https://i.imgur.com/yXP3IiH.png https://i.imgur.com/7NEXCFL.png https://i.imgur.com/AfyOLZg.png At this point in the action, the camera cuts to the Hawaii Police datacenter with whizzing tape and classic 70s datacenter imagery (indicating among other things how computerized they already were; something that surprised me - some of the datacenter sets didn't look like mockups/props). For 1975, this was unusual, in that it depicted, fairly accurately, remote access via modem, and why the ADDS Envoy was a real terminal, I am unclear about his radio phone but it doesn't look like a prop. https://i.imgur.com/t5zdTWg.png https://i.imgur.com/gG8IYnf.png https://i.imgur.com/xuqJZOR.png Periodically, the bad guy is shown with a notebook of dial-up numbers to do his dirty business and for 1975 the episode does a bizarrely good job of showing how modems work without getting fantastical (the explanation of remote access is slow and deliberate to make the plot understandable). Anyway I realize this is a little off-topic and doesn't constitute BBSing, but there are many examples of modem access of other systems -- including a pretty good scene in The Equalizer where a hacker sits in midtown Manhattan, couples to a remote system via a public payphone and a luggable. Then there is the underrated (I think) 1983 Canadian film, Hide & Seek, based on the cult classic novel "The Adolescence of P-1." What it lacks in BBSing, it makes up for in Commodore pornography -- whole classrooms of networked PETs, a nuclear energy facility run by Commodore 64s. But most impressively -- ordering pizza by modem, which must have seemed nuts at the time: https://i.imgur.com/UjkoY1o.png And using an acoustic coupler at a diner, a guy with a portable paper- based (!) TTY dialing in... https://i.imgur.com/eVkjqxh.jpg This is an odd movie because there are scenes in it which are similar to ones in Wargames but it is unclear who borrowed from who -- tempting though it is to say Hide & Seek borrowed from Wargames, it is based on a novel which predates Wargames by several years (1977), although it is a loose adaptation (in the novel, the high school kids in Hide & Seek were college kids, and they were creating a distributed AI which lived in the spare storage and processing cycles of a Compuserve-like service.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ebola_flakes_II · 2019-12-23 14:01 For us it doesn't really seem to exist anymore. But I see it a bit for my kid who's just "discovering" internet. Stuff like chatting or playing games with friends online are very exciting when she's experiencing it for the first times. Sure, far cry from the nerds we had to be or become to figure all that stuff out decades ago but still cool. Someone else mentioned the drama "Halt and Catch Fire" in another reply and I'll second that. It's currently available on Netflix. Drama that covers from the early days of PC's up to relatively modern times through the eyes of innovators in the field. Enjoyed that a good deal. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- lucidphreak · 2019-12-23 14:57 BBS's in Wargames? Where??? Only thing I recall him doing with a computer was running a wargames dialer, and then connecting to the mainframe. The book neuromancer by william gibson (the granddaddy of all cyberpunk books in my opinion and one of the best books ever written) makes mention of "boards" when referring to phreaks... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2019-12-23 15:11 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- charmanderincharge · 2019-12-23 15:12 How could she have the time to dial a bbs between being passed around by directors and producers? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ReicientNomen · 2019-12-24 00:49 Thanks for the comprehensive reply, and for including the screenshots! I’m looking up all of these, and also craving one of those ADDS Envoy terminals. I’m amused at the guy with the paper TTY in public, because that’s clearly an impact/dot matrix printer. Considering how loud those are, he would likely be thrown out of any establishment with great prejudice. I could buy if it was a thermal or spark printer, but dot matrix? It would be cheaper and more practical than other contemporary display technologies, sure, but maybe not for casual use in public. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SqualorTrawler · 2019-12-24 02:01 FYI, the whole movie of Hide & Seek is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjByXo8JVc0 It is not a great movie but it is fun to look at the computers. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ReicientNomen · 2019-12-25 08:20 I actually enjoyed that one, surprisingly good for a TV movie. Sure, the thought of a high schooler creating a self-evolving AI on a Commodore PET stretches the believability a little, but War Games doesn’t win any realism awards either. They’re strikingly similar movies, but considering the source book for Hide and Seek came out in the late 70s, I wonder if the influence didn’t work both ways. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 9600bps · 2020-01-03 16:25 Found it! *Growing Pains*, "The Kid", s02e06, [https://www.dailymotion.com/video /x4ck0uz](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4ck0uz) Start at 03:20, Maggie is examining Carol's Christmas cookies. She holds one up, puzzled. >Carol: "No, mom, It's a modem." > >Maggie: "A modem?" > >Carol: "The thing I needed for my computer, that if I get will make this the happiest Christmas ever." Around 04:37 she says that you can use a modem to connect to any database on the planet. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jdavidramsey · 2020-01-12 01:49 Ah! For some reason, I remembered her mentioning BBSes specifically. I guess as a BBSing kid back then, any mention of a modem implicitly meant BBSing to me. I still stand behind the Law & Order plot point, though. Of course, that's only because I saw that episode again very recently. Thanks for seeking out the Growing Pains episode! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 9600bps · 2020-01-13 18:32 > I still stand behind the Law & Order plot point, though. Of course, that's only because I saw that episode again very recently. That Law & Order ep is incredible! I caught it totally by accident a few years back and made a note: *Rebels*, S06E02, 1995: [https://lawan dorder.fandom.com/wiki/Rebels](https://lawandorder.fandom.com/wiki/Reb els) Also, the actor who played the hacker, Chris Messina, also had a small part in *You've Got Mail*. Cracking the code of 90s computer film/TV? :) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jdavidramsey · 2020-01-14 02:14 Whoa. I'll have to watch this one, as the one I'm thinking of is different. "Virus," s03e19, 1993. This episode also features a Legion of Doom/Cult of the Dead Cow homage in the name of the fictional hacking group, Depatment of Doom (DoD). I think making sure the initialization matches a government agency's was a touch that showed the writers were paying attention during their research. Very rare indeed! (On the other hand, there's also the assumption that all BBSes were underground hangouts for online delinquents, so the writers weren't perfect by any means.) [https://lawandorder.fandom.com/wiki/Virus](https://lawandorder.fandom .com/wiki/Virus) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 9600bps · 2020-01-20 20:07 Amazing! I will have to dig this one up, too.