BBS- The Documentary

I don't know if any of you were involved with this in the mid-late 80s, but I was (8yrs old to 13 yrs old). I was the Sysop of a BBS. I ran it first out of my house on a Commodore 128 with a 1200baud ($300) modem of mine, then later my school sponsored me and gave me the phonelines and equipment to run it a C128 with a 9600 baud and a 10Mb Hard Drive and three...count them three phone lines. When I left the elementary school, they sold the BBS to my junior highschool for 4 Mac PCs. It was never re-established because there was no staff at the Junior high or High School that knew how to run it. I wrote the sucker myself from scratch in Basic. I was able to place second in my schools science fair with it. (I should have won, but the judges didn't understand the technology so they gave me second because they weren't sure if I was lying or not about it).

BBS's were great fun and well, ahead of their time. They were quickly replaced by the internet and WWW.

This is an 8 part, 5.5 hour documentary. It's amusing and I thought you might get a kick out of it. This miniseries was made for public consumption, so you can legally watch it streaming from Google. I have watched the first two videos, they are fun, but somewhat repetitive.

The Documentaries Main page: http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/

Episode 1
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1...the+documentary

Episode 2
http://www.truveo.com/The-BBS-Documentary-...s/id/1925713524

Episode 3
http://www.veoh.com/videos/v9916084qQGeR67z

Episode 4
http://www.veoh.com/videos/v9916237NPaGZxWg

Episode 5
http://www.veoh.com/videos/v9916801RSM8TaQt

Episode 6
http://www.veoh.com/videos/v9916823bsbGFezR

Episode 7
http://www.veoh.com/videos/v9916830MHbQQQ4D

Episode 8
http://www.veoh.com/videos/v9916838cX2yJHnY

Nice find. I'll have to watch those when I get time. Ahh.. BBS'ing, now that was grassroots communications.

Strange how I could do as much with that as I can do with some inet apps, like pack and receive mail packets from fidonet. I ran mine on a 386x16 @2400b, 2 lines. I spent more $$$ on that than I care to remember ;p

Later Paladin set me up on unix at the university. What a leap in technology 🙂

I think my whole entire internet experience has been trying to recreate the enjoyment I got from BBS's.

I bought my first used 300 Baud for $70. It wouldn't autodial, so I had to keep dialing the BBS until I got through, then do an ata on the screen. I was using a good ole C64 on a TG&Y Tv. Good times.

In a strange way, I view this forum as a BBS. It's got a lot of similarities.

I really do not have ANY clue what u guys are talking about, but I will watch that vids.

Think its awfully sweet of Bubba tho that he starts talking about his BBS experience. (I really mean what I am saying)
I was already curious when I read about it in another forum, but all he was saying there was, that he got sponsered by his High School. So nice that you talk a little more finally. 🙂

Bubba: (I should have won, but the judges didn't understand the technology so they gave me second because they weren't sure if I was lying or not about it).

Shame on them judges!!!

There is one thing I´d like to know, Bubba! Hwo did you call yourself at High School time SISUP or SIZEUP ???

🤣

Haha, Saint when we talk about BBS's we're kinda giving away our ages ;p

Bulletin Board Systems were more on less a mini forum/ftp service you could run on one phone line, one user at a time. Later Fidonet was developed that allowed any number of BBS's to pack and share msg bases. We had as many areas as any forum has, just needed 1 phone line for each user. I was a big timer as I had two lines, three at night if I used my home line, so two or three users could chat in real time ;p

As Atomm says, its about the same experience, but it was grittier, or more geeky. I think there was a total of 16 ansi colors following the IBM modem specs. Fidonet allowed crossing of boundaries as related to phone charges. Then I was a libertarian fighting republicans, go figure 😛

The arguments were just as heated. We had computer wars, political wars, etc. It was a load of fun.

lexx wrote:Haha, Saint when we talk about BBS's we're kinda giving away our ages ;p

The arguments were just as heated. We had computer wars, political wars, etc. It was a load of fun.

🙄 I knew already that Bubba is 31. (greening)

I have the feeling all this development did past me by and I just recently woke up to discover it now. Ha Ha Ha and it is a hack of fun to chat with fun ppl or to get into arguments if they are not held with words that are too offensive, I mean. 🙂
Sometimes I really have no idea what my neighbor - a nice spanish single mother with two sons (16 and 18) - is thinking of me. I am laughing out loud. Not for too long, but then other times I am giggling a lot - and I have no sound on at those times. It´ll be really better to turn on GR1 to cover that wierd behavior up a bit. 😀

Bubbaspanky wrote:It was never re-established because there was no staff at the Junior high or High School that knew how to run it. I wrote the sucker myself from scratch in Basic. I was able to place second in my schools science fair with it. (I should have won, but the judges didn't understand the technology so they gave me second because they weren't sure if I was lying or not about it).

I wrote a telecomm program in BASIC in the early-mid 80-'s, but I was 16-18. Didja at least compile it to get speed, or did it all run under the BASIC interpreter?

I remember one of the biggest pains I had was whenever the BBS would send a QUOTE ( " ), the damn computer would go into QUOTE MODE, and then whatever was sent after that could get really crazy looking until another QUOTE was sent. I ended up using a very small ML program that resided in the tape cassette buffer (no one used cassettes by that time) that continuously turned off QUOTE MODE. Heh, nothing succeeds like brute force!


You had SKILLZ, yo. Recognize.
This graphic is getting a workout today.

Stop it you guys are getting me all misty eyed!!!!

See as much as we sometimes do not get along here, we all come from the same roots.
Sarge, Bubba, Atomm, DocJon, Lexx and myself. This is why I consider all of you friends even thought we sometimes fight like siblings.. Yes Atomm even you man!!! 😀

Hell Lexx, Docjon and I all go back to those days man.

We all started out on 300 baud modems on C-64's.. I had a TRS-80 before that even in 79/80.

Lexx was the SysOp of a popular Amiga BBS, one of the best known ones at that time I might add. He did a fantastic job on that. Another friend ran a BBS called "Hydra" that was ran on an Atari ST I believe...

DocJon and I met through a friend that I met on a thing called "Chat Thing." I believe it was.
It was a commodore 64 set up with 4 lines on it that people could chat through ran by a guy who later founded Telerama.

Bubba I also remember playign Zork and making maps. Before I ever got a stand alone version of it, I remember playing Zork all night on CompuServe and ran up a $60 bill to them for it. I don't think I ever paid that 🙂

I was 15 in 1980, started playig drums, got into Martial Arts all the computer stuff. Best time of my life until My dad died in 83 then I have been on my own ever since..

Oh well ....good times... 🙂

Paladin wrote:Stop it you guys are getting me all misty eyed!!!!

See as much as we sometimes do not get along here, we all come from the same roots.
Sarge, Bubba, Atomm, DocJon, Lexx and myself. This is why I consider all of you friends even thought we sometimes fight like siblings.. Yes Atomm even you man!!! 😀

Hell Lexx, Docjon and I all go back to those days man.

We all started out on 300 baud modems on C-64's.. I had a TRS-80 before that even in 79/80.

Lexx was the SysOp of a popular Amiga BBS, one of the best known ones at that time I might add. He did a fantastic job on that. Another friend ran a BBS called "Hydra" that was ran on an Atari ST I believe...

DocJon and I met through a friend that I met on a thing called "Chat Thing." I believe it was.
It was a commodore 64 set up with 4 lines on it that people could chat through ran by a guy who later founded Telerama.

Bubba I also remember playign Zork and making maps. Before I ever got a stand alone version of it, I remember playing Zork all night on CompuServe and ran up a $60 bill to them for it. I don't think I ever paid that 🙂

I was 15 in 1980, started playig drums, got into Martial Arts all the computer stuff. Best time of my life until My dad died in 83 then I have been on my own ever since..

Oh well ....good times... 🙂

👍

Bubbaspanky wrote:NSFW my screen cleaner

http://mirrored.flabber.nl/boob.cursor/ciagnijcycka.swf

Just FYI this is available on usenet. Good quality AVI's. Much better than the web site.

Paladin wrote:Just FYI this is available on usenet. Good quality AVI's. Much better than the web site.

This post is useless without filenames, NZB files, and/or binsearch searches. 😉

ETA:
Never mind, Paladin's talking about the BBS documentary, not Bubba's NSFW screen cleaner. 🙁

ATOMM:
Any thoughts as to what gives with the weird quoting in the forums? Paladin couldn't have meant to quote the msg he did, and it's happened several times in the past week.

DocJon wrote:ATOMM:
Any thoughts as to what gives with the weird quoting in the forums? Paladin couldn't have meant to quote the msg he did, and it's happened several times in the past week.

Perhaps a cache and cookie clear and maybe a database cleanup or re sync is due. Seems like there is some mis-threading going on.

Paladin wrote:Just FYI this is available on usenet. Good quality AVI's. Much better than the web site.

The Documentary or the screen cleaner. I actually Dl'd them from somewhere at high quality. I am nearly done with the series.

Pal, I started with a TRS 80 as well... I remember sitting up all night with it shortly after we got it typing in a code for pong... of course there was no way to save on this machine, no disk drive then for me.... so all night... I have it run and I got a syntax error. Fixed it and got another. so on a so forth until my parents came down stairs to send me to school.... and I had to shut the dang thing off.

Not sure whats going on with the weird quoting. It could be a cache thing or a db thing. I'll see if there are any scripts I can run.

Atomm wrote:Not sure whats going on with the weird quoting. It could be a cache thing or a db thing. I'll see if there are any scripts I can run.

I "think" I used the fast reply option if that helps.

Just wanted to say thanks again for telling about this beautiful experience. Finished with watching all the vids two days ago. My favorite is the "Art" one. And gush all this geeks are so funny. I don´t know what was better: watching Stan and Ollie or some of these guys. I <3 it. One of my favorite educational documentaries and I watched - uhhh - lots of them.

Yeah it was great and brought back alot of good memories.