ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

5000 BBS Changes —

I hit a milestone in December: over 5,000 corrections, changes and suggestions to the BBS List since I put it up in 2001. So that’s an average of 800 messages a year, or about two a day, every day.

The near-constant communication about that project keeps my interest alive in it. It has a lot of low-hanging fruit but adding specific older BBSes is a very time-consuming process, even with my helper scripts. That people take the time to get their information in is very encouraging, especially when these folks don’t see the changes immediately happen. (Sometimes I’ll do a bucket of changes once a month.)

I still get people who are delighted I have such a list, mixed in with a few who are angry, betrayed and disgusted I have such a list. Then again, the delight/disgust combination is pretty consistent through a lot of my work, so I’m over it. No, I do not remove information. No, I never will. Your next lifetime, make different choices.

To this day, I am still amused at the indignant messages, the ones that come in where people complain about the fact that my list (which has over 105,000 numbers listed), fails to note that their BBS ran from 1982-1986, instead of the currently-listed 1984-1986. I love getting these because they remind me of the crushing myopia that I have encountered throughout my archiving and historical projects. How you experienced it? Oh, surely that’s how everyone experienced it and your take on things is not just accurate but all-inclusive. Thank you, extremely-important-to-yourself person!

That list has been very good to me. When I get a chance, like I just did with the CBBS part-time list, I add numbers and information into it. I suspect that soon it will need to be revised in terms of how I track the information, but not quite yet. It’s humming along, and one of my most successful projects.

Keep sending me changes.


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One Comment

  1. Jim Leonard says:

    What I’d like to see, and I write this having not looked at the list in half a decade, is a list of *current* BBSes that I can call. Now that I have unlimited long-distance service for a flat fee a month, I’d love to test 1. if my VoIP service works with analog modems (probably not 🙁 and 2. which ones are still up and kicking.

    I’d like to make “calling a BBS and downloading a file” a part of my old computer restoration checklist.