Enjoyed Jason Scott’s BBS documentary | Hacker News Reader

Enjoyed Jason Scott’s BBS documentary

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115 pointsedward39 comments

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.

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...

Did your dad also accidentally buy you a second phone line that wouldn’t ring the house’s phones? ;-)

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

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...

I was still using one. By that time I had it well equipped and all the good software was useful.

Dialing BBSes was fun on that machine.

About the time frame, I got a DOS PC and did CAD work on it to afford a 386 and used Winsock to get on the net proper in late 90-91'ish.

I was right in the middle, 20 something and using the Apple for writing, BBS and some other basics.

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...

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.

> here's actually a brand new book that looks interesting: The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media.

Reading and enjoying it now! The author captures what else was happening in the world when the first BBSes came online, namely the heyday of amateur and citizens band radio.

He also did a documentary about text adventure games called "GET LAMP" which I enjoyed a lot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhbcDzbGSU

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.

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.

He did post them! They're available here: https://archive.org/details/bbs_documentary?tab=collection

Thanks a lot

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).

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.

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?

Hotline was such a great scene!

I very much remember Hotline, and from before the days of Carracho or even the Windows version. With the Windows version came the banner advertisements, and along with that, the "click here for the password" scammers. The community feeling was quickly lost to unscrupulous greed.

but yes, for quite a while, Hotline was fantastic and it felt like you could find anything. I spent many a night filling up what little hard (and Zip disk) space I had from there.

actually, Hotline is still around. someone bought hltracker.com and it's back online and happily serving the Mac OS 9 era revival. :)

also preterhuman and the agency iirc. i wonder what happened to tracker-tracker

I remember hotline very fondly. :-)

I stream old and new ansi packs in video form on twitch and YouTube. Https://www.twitch.tv/gunnard Https://www.youtube.com/gunnardengebreth

<https://www.twitch.tv/gunnard> <https://www.youtube.com/gunnardengebreth>

I love his work. Jason has captured some greatness from our recent past, and the remarkable thing to me personally is the sense of distance!

We have come a very long way! Seems an age ago!

His work does a good job communicating the more subtle things. I find I feel more than I expect.

BBS'ing was amazing!

Using the phones to send data between computers was magical! To most of us, each computer is a tool, some island amidst many. And the more early ones worked on the disks, each user leaving no trace for the next beyond the usual human things.

But now the idea of connecting to one far away made all kinds of sense. While the whole thing was not fast, I recall being impressed with it all, wondering where it was all going to go.

For the casually interested, the most interesting part is the last one, on Arc vs Zip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNXCd2EATSo

I like the Fido one best.

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.

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.

Sometimes people mention that it is missing something and I often find that what they mean is some sort of specific geographical scene or a very specific BBS. Less than a dozen BBSes are mentioned by name because I was trying to do justice to the over 100,000 that lived.

is boardwatch magazine archive online?

Partial and mostly latter--which is good but mostly not from peak BBS:

https://archive.org/details/boardwatchmagazine

For anyone looking for a place to chat re: the ANSI/BBS scenes these two discords are great:

16colors: https://discord.gg/NKKZjevg

araknet: https://discord.gg/UZru7ThM

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.

The documentary is more about the general experience of BBSes than drilling down to specific ones. Yours may not be mentioned by name but I hope that you recognize it in some of what people say anyway.

FYI there is a somewhat active BBS reddit - https://old.reddit.com/r/bbs/

For more BBS-nostalgia with new releases as well, this ANSI and ascii art site is a great resource:

https://16colo.rs/

very cool to see some of the newer art packs. thanks for this!

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.

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!

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