An Extended History Of The BBS

Before there was the Web, before Al Gore invented the Internet, before email was a daily routine, there was a set of technologies that enabled similar computerized communications, called a "BBS," for "bulletin board system." This software was part discussion forum, part messaging system, and part chat room - taken together, the BBS contained the seeds of what we all know and love and use today online.

BBSes came of age in the 1980s, and were the passion of many software developers and users alike. Thousands of them flourished and grew in the decade before the Internet, and in many ways they laid the groundwork for the growth of the Internet and its ensuing popularity. They are now almost completely extinct ; the Internet has made it easier to communicate, and TCP/IP protocols have become the dominant language of the world.

I never was a big BBS fan, although I grew up professionally alongside them, and watched the culture wax and wane. I came of age as an engineer and later as a writer and journalist during this era. At one point I had a job doing R&D for a company that was promoting an early BBS called the Electronic Information Exchange System (EIES) , which was in use in some academic and corporate settings.

But there is a still a fond place in my heart and mind for those that helped bring about this era. Luckily, video producer Jason Scott has taken it upon himself to document the many men and women that took part in major and minor BBSes around the world.

The documentary takes the form of a three-DVD package (selling for $50) that is well produced and professionally done, from the extended slip case to the many notes and supplemental materials included on the discs themselves. The videos take the form of a series of 40 minute programs that can be watched in any order, which tell the story of the software, the graphic artists, the developers, and the pioneering board operators. They also discuss other luminaries, such as Vint Cert from MCI and Ward Christensen, who built one of the first BBSes and developed the XMODEM protocols that enabled many BBS file transfer activities.

What I found interesting about the video interviews was how passionate everyone was about their BBSes - in some cases, people still had their original computing rigs, modems, and other gear from BBSes long gone from the scene. They could recall details about their activities 20 and even 30 years ago as if it were still fresh in their minds. In some cases, these were people who clearly hit their creative peaks in their early teens and twenties. But many of the people in the videos are just ordinary geeks, having fun the way geeks do : learning how to use a new computer system and telling people all about it. What is amazing is how primitive these systems are by today’s standards : we are talking character-mode screens, 300 baud modems, and hardware that was measured in single-digit MHz and KB of RAM.

Scott got his start in the BBS culture with a Web site called textfiles.com, where he archived and saved the hundreds of files that BBS owners catalogued and maintained on their boards. He then expanded his interests into video production, and began a multi-year project to interview anyone who would talk to him about their BBS experiences. It is a labor of love and it shows.

Scott conducted hundreds of interviews with people notable and unknown, all with one common element : most of the people have terrifically bad haircuts and no fashion sense whatsoever. Even years later, with many of these people in their advanced years, they still proudly wear their outdated logo T-shirts and sit on furniture that even the local Goodwill would turn down. (One woman had a sofa with a pattern of repeating 0 and 1 digits across it !) Many of the people are filmed sitting next to the gear that they ran their BBSes on, and these old relics of computers recall the dawn of the PC era, when the Commodore 64 and Apple II were new and novel.

The BBS was the precursor to many things that we take for granted now in the world of the Internet : nearly instantaneous global communications, group discussion forums, instant messaging, multi-user games, online porn, and so on. It was a culture into itself, and Scott does a terrific job of documenting this era. What makes the film particularly compelling is that he is great at letting everyone tell their individual stories, and collectively it is a fascinating tour de force.

One segment concerns the hacker BBS culture. As Scott says, "portraying a generation of BBS users as evil geniuses bent on destruction is an easy story to tell - but that isn’t the story told here." Another is the story about ANSI/ASCII art, images that are entirely constructed out of characters meant to be printed on a typewriter - the beginnings of the modern era of computer generated art and the online porn industry. The story about the phone phreaks is a good one, detailing the lengths that people would go to get free long distance calls, back in the day when these calls were much more expensive than they are now. Again, this was something completely embraced by the mainstream, with freebie IP voice software such as Skype.

"People today get their noses pierced. We were anarchists back then."

For those of you who fondly remember the BBS era, this video is a must-have and recommended viewing. It is entertaining, it is informative, and it is exceptionally well done. For those of you too young to remember, it is a trip back in time to a part of our computing history that is well worth exploring. The video can be ordered at Scott’s web site .