Player has chapters 1-8 selectable below it.
Jason put his whole BBS documentary movie online in public domain.
I own this. It’s supremely awesome. Also, if you want to watch the raw un-cut interviews they’re all up here too if you search the site for “BBS Documentary”.
This movie should really be MANDATORY VIEWING for everybody who wants to carry a nerd badge.
Added bonus - TBBS VHS tape digitized. It’s the how-to for setting up and running a TBBS system.
Very cool…will definitely watch. The amount of time I (mis)spent in my youth dialling-up (when it wasn’t ringing busy) every local BBS I could find would add up to an embarrassing sum.
Yeah, this brings back some memories… I’ve only watched Episode 1 so far though.
My first computer was a C64 that I eventually got a 1650 300 baud modem for and I was very active in BBSes, particularly in the northeast (since I grew up in the Boston area). The odd thing when watching this is that I used to “know” some of these dorks being interviewed, including having met some of them irl back then at 2600 meetings and other such dorky get togethers during my wasted youth.
Sounds just like me CCZ, minus the northeast part. I remember the day I upgraded from the 300baud to 2400 (skipped over 1200). Woooooo.
I remember being in 7th grade or so, standing at a Walden Books in the mall reading a Compute! Gazette magazine. Another kid around the same age asked if I had a modem. WTF? He said it was all the rage. It has been all downhill since.
True nerd badge is having lived it ;)
I read this as WoW - The BBC Documentary and was momentarily intrigued.
I bought this on DVD when it came out. It’s very good for anyone who was online during the pre-mass-internet days. Good stuff. (I ran a BBS on my C64 and my Amiga… good times).
In fact, when I was around 10, I saved up paper route money to buy a Commodore 1670 modem (1200 baud). Boy I was a nerd.
Yeah, and you could BUY A CAR for the price of a 9600 bps modem. But man, you could download a floppy disk in under an hour. That was crazy fast. A whole meg and a half dood.
If you had a 9600 that meant either your daddy was rich, or you were a warez courier. Ludicrous speed.
I was too poor to get a 9600 baud modem until after the prices came way down and by then I was using my Amiga (500, also too poor to buy the Amiga 1000 I lusted after when it was first released).
The biggest deal for me after upgrading wasn’t so much the speed boost (though obviously that was nice), but the fact that the modem actually had error correction – no more line noise!
I got a USRobotics Courier HST (14400 bps) for my Amiga. I was able to get a discounted price through their “Sysop program” since I ran a BBS. So instead of $799 it was only $299. I admit it, I used it to get warez too. And boy was it fast.
Why only 1? I had a fleet of them. >:)
Didn’t the dial up service cost like 5$ an hour back then? And that is in 1985 dollars!
You had to get the “unlimited local calling” service for like $30/mo. Then dig out your phone book to figure out exactly which towns were in your local calling area and what their prefixes were.
The day I got a 14400 Courier HST modem was magical. I think it was 1987. I paid $600 for it, worth every penny.
And yeah, I downloaded porn and warez.
Jason is now the caretaker of the most popular caton the internet (who I have petted), so I guess he doesn’t need the income (which has probably slowed down to a trickle by now) on DVD sales.
Or he’s a good businessman who realized that at this point, giving the documentary away for free is just advertising that will lead to people buying the DVDs.
Hi, just to be super-type-A: it’s not in the public domain. It’s freely available via the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license. But it’s still copyrighted.
This doesn’t mean much in practice to the end user, but precision is important.
So far I watched the first episode and it was beautiful. Really brings back memories. It was funny to see how even back then there were fan boys saying things like Apple sux and Atari roolz! Also some BBS’s had a kind of strict vetting process where the first two months of the new year they did not accept new members to weed out all the noobs who just got a new modem for christmas. So qt3 is part of a proud and ancient heritage.
That whole open source movies is a great idea. Any other suggestions of good videos to watch on that site?
p.s. The spell checker accepts noobs as a real word, but not roolz or sux. I imagine their time will come.
I bought this too when it came out and loved it. It was a great trip back down memory lane, but had some great things that I didn’t know about that were happening at the time. Though I’m sure I didn’t run up the phone bills as much as some of you, I still tried to keep things local to escape the wrath of paying for all of the long distance.
I remember getting a hold of a prefix list of numbers that were local to mine, and then would scan the local computer magazines BBS list and hit up anyone that I could call locally. One blessing for being in the Bay Area is that I had “& the temple of the screaming electron” as a local site, and man did they have one of the greatest text file depositories!
Roolz? NEVAR! Rulez is the proper l33t-speak spelling of the word. Rulz is also acceptable as a short-form slang usage of the word, but only newbz would use “roolz”.
I didn’t run up huge phone bills because I used to break the law and make most of my long distance phone calls for free (via using misconfigured PBX extenders of companies that were within my local calling area, etc). I don’t mention this because I am proud of it or anything, because I’m not, but that’s basically how I and most of the people I “hung out with” (online) back then avoided the insane phone bills that would often come with using lots of BBSes.
I was a user on Jason Scott(the guy who did this documentary)'s “The Works”, which was local to me… so yeah, plenty of access to “textfiles”. I used to chat with a bunch of those cDc guys online back in the day, particularly Deth Veggie but also Sketch (Jason Scott), Drunkfux, et al.
Now you’re bringing back the memories. I remember &totse very well. I used to have to wait until after 8pm when the rates went down, but I’d dial in there and Cool Beans!, and a couple of other cDc-affiliated BBSs (whose names I’ve forgotten) whenever I could get an open line. And yeah, great texts.
I’ve been watching this series as I can, and stuff I thought I’d wiped from my memory completely is flooding back. Download protocols, Fidonet echoes, door games, holy wars over which BBS software was best. Computers were awesome in the 80s.
Ditto the memory flood. When they started interviewing Steve Punter and showed his name I was like “OMGWTFBBQ THE Punter? Of the Punter protocol?”. I don’t think I’d ever seen a picture or video of him previously. Christensen and Forsberg were more pseduo famous so I’d was already more aware they were real people with faces and everything.