BBS the Documentary (2013) [video]

My favorite parts are the fidonet interviews - really fascinating and technically interesting.

Thank you, Jason.

His main site is http://www.textfiles.com and his blog is http://ascii.textfiles.com

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

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?

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.