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The BBS Documentary


JohnPolka

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Who all has watched the BBS Documentary that came out in 2005?

 

Earier this month, I finally got through all 8 parts of "the BBS Documentary". The entire documentary is over 4 hours long, so it took me a few days to get through the entire film. Overall, it was good, however, it seemed a bit PC heavy.

 

Part 1 included the early days of BBSing including interviews with Ward Christensen. Curt Vendel of Atari Museum fame was also interviewed. My favorite part was the first part because it includes Atari's BBS heyday. Some of the documentary's tone was a little depressing because many of the interviewees talked about the Internet killing the hobby. But as we know, just a few short years later, we had a BBS reboot where several older systems returned with Internet connectivity.

 

The second part centered on the people (i.e., users and SysOps). If you were on BBSs in the 80s and 90s, you  certainly knew people like the ones interviewed in this part. If you are a fan of FidoNet, there's one part dedicated to the history of FidoNet. It's amazing that FidoNet is still going today.

 

There is also a part that discusses the Art Scene. It started off with a history lesson. Early telegraph operators would send eachother greeting cards and other pictures made up of text. Unfortunately, after a general description about character sets, they jumped to PC ANSI. They didn't even mention some of the earlier character sets that allowed artwork such as ATASCII and PETSCII. 

 

Hacking and phreaking is a topic of another part, but it didn't reveal much on that scene. At least, I didn't learn much more than I already knew.

 

Regardless of the documentary's shortcomings, it was still a very enjoyable film. The sound track was well done too. I recommend it to those who were or who are still active in the hobby. Physical DVDs of the documentary are out of print. Therefore, they cost between $50 and $100 on eBay. Fortunately, you can find the entire documentary on youtube.
 

-JP

Edited by JohnPolka
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2 hours ago, Tillek said:

Yeah, I guess it's about time I watched it too...... We should all watch it and write a one page book report. ;)

 

If we were a closed club, we could impose a written report as initiation, eh? ?

 

-JP

 

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14 hours ago, JohnPolka said:

If we were a closed club, we could impose a written report as initiation, eh? ?

 

-JP

 

Eh, we can always kick people out for not doing their homework.  Of course, we'd have to call it "expulsion" in that case. ;)

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 6/20/2019 at 1:22 PM, JohnPolka said:

Hacking and phreaking is a topic of another part,

Guilty, this was the kind of BBS I ran, until it was shut down by the feds the summer of 85! Those were the days, the analog phone system was so much fun to play with, and the download times for people to download Rescue on Fractalus pre-release at 1200bps were mind blowing. My BBS had lots of busy signals. It was called Crystal Palace and was the first one in the 209 area code of California, now 559.  

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On 7/8/2019 at 11:53 AM, Gavin1968 said:

Guilty, this was the kind of BBS I ran, until it was shut down by the feds the summer of 85! Those were the days, the analog phone system was so much fun to play with, and the download times for people to download Rescue on Fractalus pre-release at 1200bps were mind blowing. My BBS had lots of busy signals. It was called Crystal Palace and was the first one in the 209 area code of California, now 559.  

I ran Dallas Hack Shack, The Veiled Society, and Blitz BBS.. Blitz being my atari warez and phreaking BBS.. I got taken down too but not until the 90’s when OPeration Sundevil swept through.. Pondering writing a book about that whole ordeal... 

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Here it is: https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/3535883/BBS.The.Documentary.dvdrip-INFOFALLOUT

 

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:964ffb5c773c4bbe0ae9a1f83d7f8ef096170c41&dn=BBS.The.Documentary.dvdrip-INFOFALLOUT&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.leechers-paradise.org%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.demonii.com%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fexodus.desync.com%3A6969

 

 

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  • 2 months later...

I ran into this a few years ago.  We had a big storm that spawned a few tornadoes and lost power for 3 or 4 days.  Went to stay with my sister and her family..  however they had to work that weekend..  and without anything else to do found it on Youtube.  watched it over the course or two days.  

 

A couple years later, I got stuck working a security account over night (sitting in my car the entire shift), hooked up the tablet to the WiFi and watched it all the way through in one sitting.  

 

I came into the scene rather late (early part of the mid 90's) but it still brought up some good old nostalgia.  I would call a couple of the local boards. And since my parents didn't want me meeting any of those "crazy computer people," I  snuck out to some of the meet ups.  I dreamed of running my own BBS though after the popularity of the internet exploded, I thought it was a lost dream.    

Watching the BBS Documentary got me into wondering if any of the boards were still around.  I was very excited to see many many boards were around and accessible via telnet.  So I opened my own, the Black Sun BBS.  Looking for more of a challenge, I am sitting with two (soon to be three) Atari 8-bit computers and planning on which one to switch my board to.  

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 10/5/2019 at 1:15 PM, Captain Kiwi said:

Watching the BBS Documentary got me into wondering if any of the boards were still around.  I was very excited to see many many boards were around and accessible via telnet.  So I opened my own, the Black Sun BBS.  Looking for more of a challenge, I am sitting with two (soon to be three) Atari 8-bit computers and planning on which one to switch my board to.  

Yep... thats a fancy smancy PC bbs.. need to get back to the atari roots.. There are lots of BBS softwares, some require a lot of work.. (maintenance) for the 8-bit and 16-bit. I am playing with a lot of it.

 

Unfortunately what we really need are more callers. We have more wanna be sysops (im one of them) than callers at the moment.

 

James

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