Curt Vendel on the BBS Documentary

[JonnyBritish]

Recently I got a copy of a DVD called the BBS Documentary which comes on three DVD's. Of interest was on the back cover was a picture of some Atari equipment. I played disk 1 tonight and there was an extra called collecting Atari...

 

Yep you guessed it, an interview with Curl Vendel!

 

If you have or had an interest in the BBS scene then I recommend this set.

 

http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/

[Curt Vendel]

Oh not THAT idiot!!!

 

oh wait... that's me...

 

 

http://bbsdocumentary.dreamhost.com/photos/101vendel/index.html

 

 

(Oh and I'm not that fat anymore... That's sympathy weight, that was just a few months after my wife was pregnant at the time, so I had packed on the pounds back then!)

 

not fat, though the idiot part... hmmmm....

 

Curt

Edited May 15, 2010 by Curt Vendel

[+DarkLord]

Hey Curt - thanks for the heads-up.

 

Does the documentary actually cover Atari hardware and BBS software?

 

That would be awesome - I've always hesitated about buying this set

because I was afraid it would be a Wildcat...PC...blah, blah, blah

review fest...

 

If it was a lot of general BBS coverage, I guess I'd still be intrigued.

 

Got a vested interest in BBS'ing ya know...

 

Thanks!

[carmel_andrews]

Does this mean that Curt used to run a BBS, If so was it a popular one (I am guessing it was A8/ST based)

[JonnyBritish]

Hey Curt - thanks for the heads-up.

 

Does the documentary actually cover Atari hardware and BBS software?

 

That would be awesome - I've always hesitated about buying this set

because I was afraid it would be a Wildcat...PC...blah, blah, blah

review fest...

 

If it was a lot of general BBS coverage, I guess I'd still be intrigued.

 

Got a vested interest in BBS'ing ya know...

 

Thanks!

 

I think its more general BBS stuff rather than Atari focused. However its amazing to see interviews with many of the key people in the BBS world like the guy who invented xmodem etc.

 

Speaking of BBS's

 

Does anyone have a copy of BBS Express Pro?

[monzamess]

Right--not Atari-specific but fascinating to anyone who was in on the BBS days in the 80s and 90s (and boring as hell to anyone else). Highly recommended.

[Curt Vendel]

I haven't watched it in a long time, I was asked so many questions and Jason just kept the camera rolling and when certain conversations in the documentary come up, he'd have little 5-10 sec interjections from like 10-20 of us...

 

I remember going into it a bit about the whole "Who's Computer is Better" wars on the BBS', I know I talked about AMIS and such, I don't know how much of it was used...

 

It is a great documentary and goes into a lot of area's, talks about the first BBS, about the fidonet wars, commercialization of BBS', the end of BBS's and so forth.

 

Jason did a really top notch job and he did it all by himself, I give him a LOT of credit.

 

 

Curt

 

Hey Curt - thanks for the heads-up.

 

Does the documentary actually cover Atari hardware and BBS software?

 

That would be awesome - I've always hesitated about buying this set

because I was afraid it would be a Wildcat...PC...blah, blah, blah

review fest...

 

If it was a lot of general BBS coverage, I guess I'd still be intrigued.

 

Got a vested interest in BBS'ing ya know...

 

Thanks!

[Curt Vendel]

Yes,

 

I ran The Star Trek BBS, then redid it to the Earth Access Center and started to copy in all of the Compuserve chat's and copied all of the news from the Atari Corp BBS to post on my BBS in New York. Ran that until around 1989 or so.

 

I had it running on 2 Atari 800's hooked to a Corvus Hard Drive and had a custom relay board system through the joystick ports to do write-semaphore signaling to allow both computers to do a realtime chat with one another. I used a copy of Carnival BBS and modified the living daylights out of it... it was a lot of fun.

 

I didn't have airconditioning, so I ran a fan pointed down at the computers to try and keep them cool otherwise they'd overheat and lock up all of the time.

 

I used to have trouble going to sleep at night, because I'd see the lights blinking away on the Hayes 1200 smartmodems and I always wanted to get up and jump into a chat with someone... there were many a night I'd be up until 6:30am and then have to just go right into the shower, dress and head to the bus to travel into Manhattan to go up to Columbus Circle to college, I'd sleep in the computer lab in the back during breaks between classes.

 

Fun times :-)

 

 

 

Curt

, then

Does this mean that Curt used to run a BBS, If so was it a popular one (I am guessing it was A8/ST based)

[+AtariNerd]

Given how some people reference and venerate Curt (me included) , here, I somehow pictured him as being somewhere in his 60's or 70's for some reason. Yeah, I know the docu is 10 years old, just that, well..

[+Stephen]

Just had to jump in say this is an awesome documentary. It covers BBSes from the 1st computer to computer call through the ANSI art days on the PC.

[JonnyBritish]

Just had to jump in say this is an awesome documentary. It covers BBSes from the 1st computer to computer call through the ANSI art days on the PC.

 

The same guy is doing another on the text adventure scene.

[tyranthraxus]

I hesitated on buying this for a long while and bought it last December, I was only into BBSs from about 1994-1995. Watching the DVD made me wish I'd tried it sooner. They cover a lot of topics, some more interesting than others, and its quite a no-budget, crude, DIY effort. But there is some amazing stories by some very interesting people. Learning about first the BBS, Fidonet (which I used heavily before being seduced by Usenet), piracy, and the ZIP-ARC war. There is plenty of stuff there to keep anyone interested in early computing & BBSs entertained.

 

IIRC the author put the whole thing himself on bit torrent. Buying the physical set if you want to support the author but the author has said he has only a few copies left and won't make another run for quite sometime. Not surprising given the shift between digital and physical sales in recent years. But while the filmmaking is primitive, the packaging & DVD is quality.

[Rybags]

I have to confess, I used to dial up heaps of interstate BBSes from a work machine back in the early/mid 90s.

 

No idea what the phone bill would have been - although being a government department they would have likely had leased connections to bring it down a bit.

 

Also kinda funny that in those days, we'd sit there for hours and be almost happy with the 9.6 and 14kbps speeds of the time.

[PeteD]

I hesitated on buying this for a long while and bought it last December, I was only into BBSs from about 1994-1995. Watching the DVD made me wish I'd tried it sooner. They cover a lot of topics, some more interesting than others, and its quite a no-budget, crude, DIY effort. But there is some amazing stories by some very interesting people. Learning about first the BBS, Fidonet (which I used heavily before being seduced by Usenet), piracy, and the ZIP-ARC war. There is plenty of stuff there to keep anyone interested in early computing & BBSs entertained.

 

IIRC the author put the whole thing himself on bit torrent. Buying the physical set if you want to support the author but the author has said he has only a few copies left and won't make another run for quite sometime. Not surprising given the shift between digital and physical sales in recent years. But while the filmmaking is primitive, the packaging & DVD is quality.

 

Yeah, it's Creative Commons (message from him) so free to download but the DVD has bonus material..

 

 

Pete

[Rybags]

Well, in that case, I've got it from PirateBay and will continue seeding for a couple of days.

 

It arrived in fairly short order, not the 2-3 days it sometimes takes a single episode from public trackers.

[snicklin]

Wow, I would LOVE that cabinet in Curt's pictures!

Edited May 16, 2010 by snicklin

[Curt Vendel]

Not many of them. John Hardie of CGE also has one as well - he has it at the show every year, I'm sure he'll have it out this year as well... they look awesome when the lighting is turned down and everything on the display is lit up.

 

 

Curt

 

Wow, I would LOVE that cabinet in Curt's pictures!

[carmel_andrews]

Curt...Did you ever try that BBS patch that allowed BBS's to operate at split baud rates (as, apparently up until then most bbs's ran at particular baud rates and not split baud rates, I recall it had something to do with programming pokey's registers or timers)

 

I never got into BBS's mainly because of the exorbitant costs of using one (since the market for telecoms in UK wasn't deregulated like it is now, during the golden age of bbs's)

 

From the research i did into bbs's though, I noticed that the majority of them were either allied with or owned by various user groups (with the exception of compuserve and the source/games people play/prestel etc)

[joeventura]

Yes,

 

I ran The Star Trek BBS, then redid it to the Earth Access Center and started to copy in all of the Compuserve chat's and copied all of the news from the Atari Corp BBS to post on my BBS in New York. Ran that until around 1989 or so.

 

I had it running on 2 Atari 800's hooked to a Corvus Hard Drive and had a custom relay board system through the joystick ports to do write-semaphore signaling to allow both computers to do a realtime chat with one another. I used a copy of Carnival BBS and modified the living daylights out of it... it was a lot of fun.

 

I didn't have airconditioning, so I ran a fan pointed down at the computers to try and keep them cool otherwise they'd overheat and lock up all of the time.

 

I used to have trouble going to sleep at night, because I'd see the lights blinking away on the Hayes 1200 smartmodems and I always wanted to get up and jump into a chat with someone... there were many a night I'd be up until 6:30am and then have to just go right into the shower, dress and head to the bus to travel into Manhattan to go up to Columbus Circle to college, I'd sleep in the computer lab in the back during breaks between classes.

 

Fun times :-)

 

 

 

Curt

, then

Does this mean that Curt used to run a BBS, If so was it a popular one (I am guessing it was A8/ST based)

 

 

Yes I remember many of those nights chatting with you Curt.

Those were the days! Simple times!

[+bf2k+]

 

From the research i did into bbs's though, I noticed that the majority of them were either allied with or owned by various user groups (with the exception of compuserve and the source/games people play/prestel etc)

 

From my personal experience (which is considerable), the majority of them were owned by private individuals footing the bills out of their own pockets.

[MEtalGuy66]

Hahah. RESEARCH.. Carmel.. You were alive during the BBS days, dude.. You don't remember in your own rite?

 

Yeah in every user group, there was usually at least one guy who wanted to be a "sysop" and put up a bbs bearing the name of the user group. But truly, there were alot more BBSes that were just run by individuals for their own reasons. There were some special interests boards.. eg. Sci-fi, file-sharing, multi-user chat.. but most had a little bit of everything, and were just run by computer enthusiasts who enjoyed maintaining a system that alot of people like theirselves could connect to and exchange messages, ideas, files, etc..

[doctor_x]

countless overseas and LD boards were called by me - I remember being totally giddy when I connected to a warez board in Alaska, and then in Australia. Unfortunately the Aussie board felt like it was running at about 90 baud through my xm301.

 

I used to marvel at the different ATASCII screens and variations of warez I would find depending on where I called geographically - and even more so the hacker apps and bbs programs and variations of bbs programs that I would find in the file sections.

 

its these memories that are the foundation of what the 8 Bit Underground is all about...as mentioned before though, MAN the c64/128 scene was preserved SO much more nicely than the atari8 scene when it comes to the underground stuff.

 

as for the bbs documentary - yes, Jason did an incredible job. I used to call The Works bbs which was a text file HEAVEN back in the day and his site now is even better than the BBS was. Definitely check out the bbs docu if you have not scene it!!!

 

doc

[JonnyBritish]

I have yet to watch the whole thing. Hoping that Ray Gwinn makes an appearance. As I recall he made a FOSSIL drive called X00.SYS. This was a standard way for software to use the com ports. We even used it to communicate with data collection devices. Ah the good old days

[monzamess]

I ran a stupid "BBS that only works at night" thing because my parents wouldn't let me get a dedicated phone line. No matter how much I advertised that it ran only at night, I (and my parents) got lots of "BEEEP SCREEEEEEECH" calls all day long. I forgot the software I used, but it ran on a single-floppy 520ST--the ST had a broken keyboard for the first week of operation--only half the keys worked--chats were fun. I "dialed into" it using my dad's PC to do maintenance until the ST's keyboard was fixed. Turns out you can make two modems connect on the same phone line without making a call--kind of like a Rube Goldberg version of a null modem cable. Anyway, it was a short-lived endeavor.

Edited May 19, 2010 by monzamess

[+bf2k+]

I ran a stupid "BBS that only works at night" thing because my parents wouldn't let me get a dedicated phone line. No matter how much I advertised that it ran only at night, I (and my parents) got lots of "BEEEP SCREEEEEEECH" calls all day long. I forgot the software I used, but it ran on a single-floppy 520ST--the ST had a broken keyboard for the first week of operation--only half the keys worked--chats were fun. I "dialed into" it using my dad's PC to do maintenance until the ST's keyboard was fixed. Turns out you can make two modems connect on the same phone line without making a call--kind of like a Rube Goldberg version of a null modem cable. Anyway, it was a short-lived endeavor.

 

I did the 11pm-7am BBS thing when I first started it up... It lasted 1 week. The modem calls during the day drove us crazy.