BBS: The Documentary

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BBS: The Documentary
BBS Documentary.jpg
DVD cover for BBS: The Documentary
Directed by Jason Scott
Written byJason Scott
Produced byNicole Sparks
Edited byJason Scott
Release date
  • May 2005 (2005-05)
Running time
4 hours 58 minutes
LanguageEnglish

BBS: The Documentary (commonly referred to as BBS Documentary) is a 3-disc, 8-episode documentary about the subculture born from the creation of the bulletin board system (BBS) filmed by computer historian Jason Scott of textfiles.com. [1] [2]

Contents

Production work began in July 2001, and completed in December 2004. The finished product began shipping in May 2005. [3]

Although the documentary was released under the Creative Commons Attribute-ShareAlike 2.0 License [4] and later under 3.0, [5] meaning that anyone can legally download it for free, the author has made it known that the downloadable version is only a fraction of the available material and recommends that individuals purchase the documentary DVDs.

Episodes

Disc 1:

  1. Baud: the beginnings of the first BBSes, featuring Ward Christensen and Randy Suess
  2. SysOps and Users: experiences from those who used and operated BBSes, including B.W. Behling from Ahoy! magazine

Disc 2:

  1. Make it Pay: the BBS industry of the 1980s and 90s featuring Philip L. Becker, founder of eSoft
  2. FidoNet: details the largest volunteer-run computer network in history
  3. Artscene: the history of the ANSI Art Scene which thrived in the BBS world

Disc 3:

  1. HPAC (Hacking Phreaking Anarchy Cracking): hear from the users of "underground" BBSes
  2. No Carrier: the end of the dial-up BBS and its integration into the Internet
  3. Compression: the story of the PKWARE/SEA legal battle of the late 1980s

Disc 3 also serves as a DVD-ROM which contains thousands of photographs from the 200 interviews recorded during the 4-year production of the film. All of the episodes are subtitled in English and include director's commentary tracks. The Artscene episode is the only one to include subtitles translated into Russian. All discs include hidden easter eggs.

Reception

BBS: The Documentary was well reviewed, mainly by publications within the technology space. Wired called it "a five-and-a-half-hour paean to the era when computers were named Stacy and Lisa, and tech loyalists fought bitter battles over the superiority of Ataris to Amigas". [2] Film Threat called it a "truly fascinating documentary about an increasingly obscure and obsolete technology". [6] Popular Mechanics called it a "labor of love" and said it was "the sort of thing that not everyone can digest, but is utterly fascinating to those that can". [3]

Since its release, the film has been cited by multiple academic works on the topic of computing history and internet culture. [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bulletin board system</span> Computer server

A bulletin board system (BBS), also called a computer bulletin board service (CBBS), was a computer server running software that allowed users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging messages with other users through public message boards and sometimes via direct chatting. In the early 1980s, message networks such as FidoNet were developed to provide services such as NetMail, which is similar to internet-based email.

FidoNet is a worldwide computer network that is used for communication between bulletin board systems (BBSes). It uses a store-and-forward system to exchange private (email) and public (forum) messages between the BBSes in the network, as well as other files and protocols in some cases.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Warez</span> Movies, software or music distributed in violation of copyright

Warez is a common computing and broader cultural term referring to pirated software that is distributed via the Internet. Warez is used most commonly as a noun, a plural form of ware, and is intended to be pronounced like the word wares. The circumvention of copy protection (cracking) is an essential step in generating warez, and based on this common mechanism, the software-focused definition has been extended to include other copyright-protected materials, including movies and games. The global array of warez groups has been referred to as "The Scene", deriving from its earlier description as "the warez scene". Distribution and trade of copyrighted works without payment of fees or royalties generally violates national and international copyright laws and agreements. The term warez covers supported as well as unsupported (abandonware) items, and legal prohibitions governing creation and distribution of warez cover both profit-driven and "enthusiast" generators and distributors of such items.

Copy protection, also known as content protection, copy prevention and copy restriction, describes measures to enforce copyright by preventing the reproduction of software, films, music, and other media.

The computer art scene, or simply artscene, is the community interested and active in the creation of computer-based artwork.

In a bulletin board system (BBS), a door is an interface between the BBS software and an external application. The term is also used to refer to the external application, a computer program that runs outside of the main bulletin board program. Sometimes called external programs, doors are the most common way to add games, utilities, and other extensions to BBSes. Because BBSes typically depended on the telephone system, BBSes and door programs tended to be local in nature, unlike modern Internet games and applications.

ACiD Productions (ACiD) is a digital art group. Founded in 1990, the group originally specialized in ANSI artwork for bulletin board systems (BBS). More recently, they have extended their reach into other graphical media and computer software development. During the BBS-era, their biggest competitor was iCE Advertisements.

Christian Wirth, better known by the pseudonym RaD Man, is an American computer artist and historian. He works in the field of ANSI art, a method of creating art using a limited set of text characters and color escape codes based loosely on the relevant ANSI standard.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mark Abene</span> American InfoSec expert and former hacker

Mark Abene is an American information security expert and entrepreneur, originally from New York City. Better known by his pseudonym Phiber Optik, he was once a member of the hacker groups Legion of Doom and Masters of Deception.

ANSI art is a computer art form that was widely used at one time on bulletin board systems. It is similar to ASCII art, but constructed from a larger set of 256 letters, numbers, and symbols — all codes found in IBM code page 437, often referred to as extended ASCII and used in MS-DOS and Unix environments. ANSI art also contains special ANSI escape sequences that color text with the 16 foreground and 8 background colours offered by ANSI.SYS, an MS-DOS device driver loosely based upon the ANSI X3.64 standard for text terminals. Some ANSI artists take advantage of the cursor control sequences within ANSI X3.64 in order to create animations, commonly referred to as ANSImations. ANSI art and text files which incorporate ANSI codes carry the de facto.ANS file extension.

iCE Advertisements

iCE Advertisements is a digital art group founded in Canada by Many Axe in 1991. Although the expanded title is rarely ever used, iCE is an acronym for Insane Creators Enterprise. iCE, along with ACiD Productions, was one of the most prominent and critically successful groups on the underground computer artscene.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tom Jennings</span> American artist, computer specialist (born 1955)

Thomas Daniel Jennings is a Los Angeles-based artist and computer programmer, known for his work that led to FidoNet, and for his work at Phoenix Software on MS-DOS integration and interoperability.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jason Scott</span> American technology historian and archivist

Jason Scott Sadofsky, more commonly known as Jason Scott, is an American archivist, historian of technology, filmmaker, performer, and actor. Scott has been known by the online pseudonyms Sketch, SketchCow, The Slipped Disk, and textfiles. He has been called "the figurehead of the digital archiving world".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Warez scene</span> Organized network of pirate groups

The Warez scene, often referred to as The Scene, is a worldwide, underground, organized network of pirate groups specializing in obtaining and illegally releasing digital media for free before their official sale date. The Scene distributes all forms of digital media, including computer games, movies, TV shows, music, and pornography. The Scene is meant to be hidden from the public, only being shared with those within the community. However, as files were commonly leaked outside the community and their popularity grew, some individuals from The Scene began leaking files and uploading them to filehosts, torrents and ed2k.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DVD region code</span> Characteristic of DVDs

DVD region codes are a digital rights management technique introduced in 1997. It is designed to allow rights holders to control the international distribution of a DVD release, including its content, release date, and price, all according to the appropriate region.

Chris Lamprecht is an American software developer based in the US state of Texas. Lamprecht was the original author of ToneLoc, a wardialing program written in the C programming language for the DOS operating system. He was the first employee and lead software architect for Indeed.com, a metasearch engine for job listings.

A text game or text-based game is an electronic game that uses a text-based user interface, that is, the user interface employs a set of encodable characters, such as ASCII, instead of bitmap or vector graphics.

textfiles.com Archive of digital media

textfiles.com is a website dedicated to preserving the digital documents that contain the history of the bulletin board system (BBS) world and various subcultures, and thus providing "a glimpse into the history of writers and artists bound by the 128 characters that the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) allowed them". The site categorizes and stores thousands of text files, primarily from the 1980s, but also contains some older files and some that were created well into the 1990s. A broad range of topics is presented, including anarchy, art, carding, computers, drugs, ezines, freemasonry, computer games, hacking, phreaking, politics, computer piracy, sex, and UFOs. The site was created and is run by Jason Scott.

Aces of ANSI Art was the first group of artists specifically organized for the purposes of creating and distributing ANSI art. The group was founded and operated by two BBS enthusiasts from California, "Zyphril" and "Chips Ahoy", from 1989 through 1991.

References

  1. Sanchez, Julian (December 2005). "The Prehistory of Cyberspace". Reason . Vol. 37, no. 7. pp. 61–67. Retrieved April 3, 2023.
  2. 1 2 Zetter, Kim (June 8, 2005). "How Humble BBS Begat Wired World". Wired .
  3. 1 2 Wenz, John (June 12, 2015). "Weekend Watch: An Extensive History of Pre-Internet BBSes". Popular Mechanics.
  4. "New BBS documentary released under Creative Commons". Jimgilliam.com. June 3, 2005. Retrieved August 10, 2009.
  5. "BBS: The Documentary". 2005. Retrieved September 5, 2015.
  6. Dickey, Daulton (August 19, 2005). "BBS: The Documentary (DVD)". Film Threat. Archived from the original on February 6, 2006.
  7. Schell, Bernadette Hlubik (2007). The Internet and Society: A Reference Handbook. ABC-Clio. pp. 277–9. ISBN   9781598840315.
  8. Söderberg, Johan (2008). Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software Movement. Routledge. p. 192. ISBN   9780415955430.
  9. Kelty, Christopher M., ed. (2008). Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. Duke University Press. p. 330. ISBN   9780822342649.
  10. Wardrip-Fruin, Noah (2009). Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies. MIT Press. p. 39. ISBN   9780262013437.
  11. Mandiberg, Michael, ed. (2012). The Social Media Reader. New York University Press. p. 117. ISBN   9780814764060.
  12. Coleman, Gabriella (2013). Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. Princeton University Press. p. 213. ISBN   9780691144610.