docwhat's blogBBS the Documentary
There is this great documentary called ”BBS the documentary” by Jason Scott. It’s an amazing documentary about computer bulliten boards and it’s 5 and 1/2 hours long with tons of extras.
For those who don’t remember BBSes: You would use a modem to dial up a computer system that had one or more modems and you could send messages (like email) and download files (like ftp) and play online games.
Why was this amazing? There was no real internet, no email, and no web. This was the way you talked to people and transfered files, etc.
I didn’t know about this documentary until I met Jason Scott (proprietor of the textfiles.com history site) at Penguicon 6.0. He had a presentation about his next documentary ”Get Lamp” which will be about interactive fiction. As a huge Infocom fan I’m really interested and can’t wait for it to come out.
Later on, Robin and I met him in the hall and we spent some time talking about his documentaries and such. We had a good time talking to him and even Robin got interested in what he was talking about. So I ordered it when we got back and it arrived last week.
It’s a bit much to watch in one go but it comes in handy half hour byte size chunks, so you can take breaks. ;-)
I heartily recommend it.
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Ciao!