BBS: The Documentary

BBS: The Documentary has finally shipped! The creator, Jason Scott, traveled roughly 20,000 miles by plane and car through 25 states and one province and interviewed 200 people. He recorded roughly 247 hours of interviews, with the shortest at 5 minutes and the longest at 5 hours. At no point did he despair, except when the police towed his rental car away in Oregon.

While over 500 people signed up for interviews, he could only see less than half of them. However, I think I have a very solid sample of the types of folks who were involved with BBSes and between all the hours, a real complete story starts to emerge.

The website has the entire photo album from all 200 interviews up. It also has trailers and other downloadable stuff.

Spanning three DVDs and totaling five and a half hours, this documentary is actually eight documentaries about different aspects of this important story in the annals of computer history.

• Baud introduces the story of the beginning of the BBS, including interviews with Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, who used a snowstorm as an inspiration to change the world.
• Sysops and Users introduce the stories of the people who used BBSes and lets them tell their own stories of living in this new world.
• Make it Pay covers the BBS industry that arose in the 1980s and grew to fantastic heights before disappearing almost overnight.
• Fidonet covers the largest volunteer-run computer network in history and the people who made it a joy and a political nightmare.
• Artscene tells the rarely-heard history of the ANSI Art Scene that thrived in the BBS world, where art was currency and battles waged over nothing more than pure talent.
• HPAC (Hacking Phreaking Anarchy Cracking) hears from some of the users of “underground” BBSes and their unique view of the world of information and computers.
• Compression tells the story of the PKWARE/SEA legal battle of the late 1980s and how a fight that broke out over something as simple as data compression resulted in waylaid lives and lost opportunity.
• No Carrier wishes a fond farewell to the dial-up BBS and its integration into the Internet.

The documentary includes Ward Christensen (creator of CBBS and creator of XMODEM for transferring files), Vinton Cerf and Wynn Wagner (wrote Opus, the BBS software).

Jason interviewed me. No … no … I didn’t create software or start some huge BBS. I was just a gal who used BBS and ran a small one in Fort Worth for a couple of years. I wrote to Jason Scott when he first announced his project. He came to DFW since there were a couple of BBS big shots around here, so I was a stopover. I wish I didn’t wear that outfit. It happened to be Mother’s Day.

BBSes gave me the opportunity to chat with people “over the phone” when I was a teen, something I couldn’t do on my own. A teen that can’t use the phone… that’s a tough place to be. I met some great and nasty people through BBSes. Despite the bad side, I would not change a thing as I met my husband through a BBS.