Hundreds of Hours of BBS Documentary Interviews

Jason Scott writes "Hi, this is Jason Scott, director of the BBS Documentary, a 4 year project to tell the story of the dial-up bulletin board systems of the 70s, 80s and 90s. The documentary's out, for sale, and is completely Creative Commons licensed. But like most documentaries, there's tons of stuff left on the cutting room floor. And that just won't do. I'm happy to announce that I have partnered with archive.org to present what will be hundreds of hours of interviews online. The BBS Documentary Interview Collection will be extended edits of the 205 interviews I conducted, presented as video and audio files, along with ZIP archives of all the photos and supporting materials for that interview. And of course, every minute is Creative Commons licensed as well. It's going to take me upwards of half a year to edit and upload the half-terabyte of files; I hope people watch a few hours here and there to get an even deeper knowledge of the history of the BBS, or maybe even make a documentary of their own."

Re:Ahhh... the good ol days.

[Anonymous Coward]

But even they knew you don't use apostrophes to make plurals. The savings from not transmitting all those apostrophes alone made up for the 300 baud modem. Also, I didn't know a single person with a 300 baud when the Amiga was in full swing.

Re:Creative commons licensed??

[aengblom]

Uh, go to the site?

Rights

All material in the BBS Documentary Interview Collection is licensed with a Creative Commons Attribute-Sharealike License; it is intended to be duplicated, remixed and used as a foundation for further documentaries or research projects.

Re:The Games!

[Mr. Underbridge]

The best thing about BBSing was the games! Any fellow LORD or Usurper players out there? Can these be considered precursers to the MMORPG's of today?

Absolutely, and you forgot the biggest one - Tradewars. Man, did that game start some flamewars.

Re:The Games!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you liked LORD how about you come join the community that plays LoGD

http://www.lotgd.net/ [lotgd.net]

Its a remake of LORD for the web that is really quite nice.

Still around....

[Daytona955i]

telnet lord.nuklear.org 10240

Their website is here: http://lord.nuklear.org/ [nuklear.org]

They actually cut footage?

[Froobly]

When I watched that 10+ hour documentary, I just sorta assumed they included every remotely interesting thing they had, otherwise you'd have a 3-hour series along the lines of Triumph of the Nerds. I mean, heck, Cringely managed to condense the history of the personal computer up until 1995 into a three-episode miniseries, right?

After seeing that there's actually 200+ hours of footage, I can understand how they'd be reluctant to cut it down past 10 hours. Still, I think they could've cut down on some of the boring politics and still gotten a few hours out of it without omitting anything important.

Still an immensely interesting documentary, and if you've got nothing to do for a week, I recommend watching it. I watched it in a two-day binge, but then I really should have been doing something else.

Re:Torrents for the original Documentary...

[Kizzle]

Link to pay for the documentary.

http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/order/ [bbsdocumentary.com]

Re:That wasn't a flame, it was a legit question

[Jason Scott]

This is a documentary. Does anyone want to argue that a healthy share of disk space on BBS systems wasn't devoted to "dirty" pictures? Does the documentary not mention that? I'd think it was worth at least some acknowledgement. It's, um, the truth?

The episode entitled "Make it Pay" covers some of the aspects of how dirty pictures represented an easy way to make fast cash on BBSes, accompanied by a few dozen advertisements I found for "adult" BBSes, and reactions by some people to this fact.

Re:This is great news! (I bought this DVD set.)

[Jason Scott]

That said, though, I also felt a few twinges of frustration during portions of the documentary. Probably my biggest "problem" with it was the segment on the ANSI artwork. It seemed like an extrordinary large amount of time was given to interviewing a bunch of younger kids who got in only on the "tail end" of the whole BBS scene, and mistakenly believed their "art groups" held much more significance than they really did in the "grand scheme".

One of the advantages of the size of the DVD set (3 DVDs, 5 and a half hours) was that I could afford to put in episodes or sections dealing with subjects that a shorter documentary (or a single-epsiode one) wouldn't have any way to put in.

Your complaint about going in too deeply on a subject that you yourself do not afford much respect to, is one that echoes here and there with basically all the episodes (except BAUD, which covers the creation of the BBS and people who buy the documentary expect this to be covered).

Fidonet and Artscene, because they're "out there", covering a very specific subject very distinctly, get very passioned positive and negative responses. Naturally, I have been criticized about how the ARTSCENE episode didn't get in-depth enough! And the FIDONET episode is a "best I could do" capturing of an impossibly-large event/movement. You strike at the heart of what I think is one of the real core strengths of the documentary being episodic; some episodes will appeal to different folks, just like BBSes. Imagine if I made it ONE EPISODE.

I mean, when I hit "play" on that portion of the DVD, I was hoping to hear interviews with the creators of the first ANSI art software packages like "The Draw" and "ANSIPaint", and/or more time given to the individual artists who first started offering to make free opening ANSI screens for BBSs around the country. They did talk to "Ebony Eyes" who was another famous ANSI artist from around that time, so that was good. But then the interview immedialtey shifted to this big "story" of the competing art groups like ACiD .... and to me, they were roughly equivalent to "script kiddies" and "warez junkies" anyway.

Ian Davis, creator of "The Draw", is not interesting in discussing or acknowledging his work. I attempted to contact him through third parties who had interviewed him in the past about this subject (and who had great difficulty in even getting him to admit he was "that" Ian Davis). No luck. The creator of ANSI Paint is Drew Olbrich, who worked, interestingly, on "Shrek" and a number of PDI movies; he was supportive of the project but not interested in an interview.

Ebony Eyes was hard to get a hold of as well; she has gone on to a successful career in magazine publishing and has to deal with a constant stream of "media people" trying to get her time. I was lucky and privileged to get time with her to discuss events of a decade and a half earler.

Are you implying that after 1990, the story is "over" and should no longer be discussed? I don't agree, and I like to think the other hours in the films that do cover earlier time periods hold their own.