Is there a BBS documentary?
Posted by solorush@reddit | Xennials | View on Reddit | 30 comments
I was kind of an early Internet pioneer. I won Mirsky’s “Worst of the the Web” at one point in 1995.
Telling my son about it, it’s hard for him to understand my meaning. Is there any good documentary on the BBS scene, with PPP and the early Internet?
Majestic_Market2006@reddit
That's an excellent question! Both my wife and I were on boards in the olden days. We've seen lot of "the early days of the internet" but not a lot of pre-AOL stuff.
Minouris@reddit
We had Internet in '95, and BBSs before that.
There was definitely an Internet before AOL - even in countries where that "A" is meaningless except for the eyeroll!
solorush@reddit (OP)
Everything seems to start at AOL! The Internet was born long before then.
Yo- if some ambitious documentarian is out there reading this, there is a good story to tell here. It was salacious, sketchy, underground, and our parents did not approve. They were probably right, but then again, here I am a full career later.
ILikeBumblebees@reddit
There was a lot of non-internet stuff going on online prior to AOL. The Source, the Well, Compuserve, GENie, Bix. And other stuff going on at the same time, like Prodigy!
QualityParticular739@reddit
The internet was around long before AOL, but it wasn't really a common thing in most households until then. Hell, I used WebTV to access the internet until the mid 90s. My family didn't even have a computer until 97 or so. The only people I knew who had home computers before high school were the rich kids.
itsasnowconemachine@reddit
It's not a video, but Ars Technica did an excellent article about 10 years ago. Fairly lengthy, goes into a bunch of different aspects.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/01/modems-warez-and-ansi-art-remembering-bbs-life-at-2400bps/
jtho78@reddit
Not a documentary but Halt and Catch Fire is a great series spanning computer tech 80s-90s. It was supposed to be the Mad Men replacement but became its own thing.
skywalkerRCP@reddit
It's a great show. Great actors and story.
ILikeBumblebees@reddit
100%. The tech nostalgia is what got me interested, but it turned out to be one of the best shows in a long time and I'd recommend it even if it had been about something else entirely.
solorush@reddit (OP)
Is this on Hulu?
jtho78@reddit
It was on Netflix. I think only AMC+ right now
solorush@reddit (OP)
That sounds super interesting… is it anywhere near Mad Men in terms of entertainment?
jtho78@reddit
Its hard to compete with Mad Men. Halt's side characters actors start to outshine Lee Pace (which is also hard) and the show evolved to give everyone equal story time.
I experienced so many of these tech advances isolated. Its interesting to experience them in the world the show built.
Medellia23@reddit
It’s very good but it’s no Mad Men in terms of quality.
pertrichor315@reddit
Then again, what is?
ILikeBumblebees@reddit
Yes! Jason Scott's BBS documentary: https://archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary
It's a bit rough around the edges, as it was his first documentary. 20 years old now, so it was made closer to the heyday of the BBS than to today. But it's a great time capsule, and has some great interviews with pioneers of the BBS world (and online communication in general) including the creator of the first BBS, Ward Christensen, who sadly passed away just a few months ago.
RaccoonObjective5674@reddit
I created my own BBS in the 90’s. I forget what the hell was on there but I remember my phone ringing with people connecting to the site. I think you could basically see what they were doing on the site if I’m not mistaken??
supergooduser@reddit
Born in 78.
There was a five hour BBS: the documentary made in 2005. You can stream it for free on YouTube here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7nj3G6Jpv2G6Gp6NvN1kUtQuW8QshBWE&si=QzmfJ1TkqG1zf4o4
I've watched it, not a great budget but definitely fun nostalgia.
I was on BBSes in 1992. I grew up in a city of 250k and we had about 20 BBSes. There wasn't a ton of activity but I was up on all the door games, I enjoyed finding random text files and even mixed up some homemade bombs in the backyard.
I'm proud of this one. We had a local ISP that offered 15 minutes of free access to the internet with a guest/guest login. It was all text based but had ftp and gopher and shit. I remember poking around on university computers and one day stumbled across someone's folder that had a bunch of shareware games and that was fucking dope.
The best was an online BBS with 800 concurrent users and forums, it was college based so.. college girls. But you needed an email address to access it.
In 1993, I was a freshman in highschool and we had a super computer class teaching us how to use computers and shit. I had an email address, used that register an account on the online BBS and then promptly lost my access in the super computer class because of unauthorized use.
With the access I created a macro that would reconnect me and log me in giving me 14 minutes of uninterrupted access. Proud of that that I jury rigged a free internet account.
The other was local BBS I got sysop privileges but the guy was just a nerd trying to make friends.
I remember being bored and discovered I had access to a daily log and when someone tried to login and typed their password in correctly it would display the typo. No one has particularly secure passwords so it was pretty easy to figure them out.
And those passwords worked on other BBSes usually was kind of neat to snoop, I never did anything malicious and would occasionally leave a note for them that it was time to change their password.
The sysops had access to a forum for pirated software which was cool. He also had a forum for porn but this was 1992-1993 the quality was godawful. I'm not sure what happened exactly.. I remember I told him about the daily log and how I was getting passwords and then he told me he turned me over to the police and I was scared shitless.
Eventually the cops came around and they were interested in this guy given kids access to porn. I think the story he tried to spin was because I admitted to hacking I had also used his BBS to create the porn forum and supply the content which for 1993 doesn't make any fucking sense really. Anyways he ended up getting arrested and there was at least one known sex offender on his BBS so something more was probably going on.
BBSes were wild yo.
Rhizobactin@reddit
Lol. Reminds me of the second line we had for our home. The ISP would drop the connection, so I had a perl script that I wrote which would detect the drop, then immediately reconnect.
solorush@reddit (OP)
Haha the 14 minute macro is amazing. Yes that’s exactly the kind of memory I’m trying to unlock.
Dude the pirate BBS scene was amazing, I’d kind of forgotten about that part. DISK 1; DISK 2.zip etc
Good times
COV3RTSM@reddit
They guys doing a BBS doc got distracted playing Lord and Trade Wars
sleepyguy007@reddit
all i know is I had to get home in the late 90s early, to tie up the phone number to my local bbs an harvest the colonists that had regenerated in tradewars2002 before my friends made it home and could take them all.
Still friends with a lot of the same guys!
I_make_switch_a_roos@reddit
i remember sending $5 when i was a kid so i could access the adult section of my local BBS 🤣
heresmytwopence@reddit
I had my own very successful BBS from 1995-1997 when I abandoned it for the Internet (regret that a lot) and loved it. My name is immortalized in the Fidonet node archives.
bcentsale@reddit
There's something on YouTube that I started watching. I think it was called "Back to the BBS." I started watching it, and it was really detailed from what I could remember, like multiple episodes, but I moved on to a different hyper fixation and that was that.
Outside_Ladder4244@reddit
https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/84836-bbs-the-documentary
OkPie8905@reddit
I’d hoped Reddit just figure out how the build in door games. That was kid me’s dream. So many Redditors don’t realize where the idea began
solorush@reddit (OP)
I know right? It’s hard to describe: ASCII art, MIDI music, and how foreign it seemed to talk to people from Russia.
OkPie8905@reddit
Or your friends learning to blow up their fingers and the anatchist cookbook becomes a legendary download. The first internet troll was in there. Smoking banana peels was from the online version and fake. But. Napalm is not fake.
I once knew a guy who got charged by police for hosting a hacked exe for a game. It made local news to blow it out of proportion but he paid a real bill
It was the best way to meet up and get to know people for the most part, with similar interests.
I felt like an adult when I connected my first 2400 baud modem to brag about
solorush@reddit (OP)
Man I remember buying my first 5600 on clearance at Circuit City