In the Summer of 2001, Jason Scott, a computer historian (and proprietor of the textfiles.com history site) wondered if anyone had made a film about these BBSes. They hadn't, so he decided he would.
Four years, thousands of miles of travelling, and over 200 interviews later, "BBS: The Documentary" [
http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/ ], a mini-series of 8 episodes about the history of the BBS, is now available. Spanning 3 DVDs and totalling five and a half hours, this documentary is actually eight documentaries about different aspects of this important story in the annals of computer history.
All Episodes/Parts (free and legit according to
http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/warez/ [Creative Commons]): Watch/Download all from
https://archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary ...
14 Comments
antSo how many of you were BBS addicts like me before the Internet scene came along?
deathcowStarted on a friends TRS-80 with a volksmodem 300 baud. My Commodore 64 which followed was vastly superior to Dag's Apple IIe. Lost interest in BBS's sometime in the 2400 baud era.
deathcowThis was great, lots of deja vu.
antI started out with a true internal Hayes 2400 modem with Prodigy in my dad's IBM P70 portable (ugh, heavy and luggage size). Then, I got introduced into BBS'. And all hell gone lose and I was addicted.
I always wanted to run a BBS, but nope parents didn't allow it.
deathcowI remember dialing into the "Pirates of Puget Sound" and downloading warez. It was long distance so I made friends with the sysop and he was kind enough to mail be a real physical box of 5 and 1/4's, that was cool. I remember hanging out at dags house and he was dialed into some place on the USA east coast that had FORTY MEGABYTES OF SOFTWARE for download. I think the transfer program was called "?Apple Express? AE2?" something like that, it rocked the socks off the Commodore 64 trading software. I remember fighting for an hour to get a 28kb program transferred across town in the early days.
I remember a cool BBS in Anchorage where everyone was awarded the privilege of some "Dragon" type, like "Platinum Dragon" meant you had access to all the forums and "Red Dragon" meant you could only get to about half of them.
I remember a super-cool BBS call "Pyroto Mountain" where you had to answer trivia to work your way up the mountain.
mauz15*documentaries
siftbotAdding video to channels (Documentaries) - requested by mauz15.
citoMy favorite BBS was called "The Green Lantern BBS" I used a 300 baud in the early days on a trs 80 then moved to a tandy 1000 EX
hehe
sending email via FIDOnet before the internet came along
antGoogle Videos are gone so use https://archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary ...
eric3579*dead
siftbotThis video has been declared non-functional; embed code must be fixed within 2 days or it will be sent to the dead pool - declared dead by eric3579.
antFixed and thanks.
*dead
ant*findthumb
siftbotThe thumbnail image for this video has been updated - findthumb requested by ant.
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