ASCII by Jason Scott

TeeVee

The most common question I recieve about the documentary, and I mean hands-down, is something along the variant of "Are you going / trying to put the documentary on PBS?" It ranges, sometimes with "PBS" being "TechTV/G4" or "IFC" or "Sundance" or the like. But the general question (asked over a hundred times, at this point) is basically, when am I going to get this on TV.

The weird, non-intuitive answer is I truly have no interest in the documentary being on television. I am not AGAINST it in the strictest sense, but I am not actually interested in wasting the time, energy and swimming upstream through lies to put it on the air.

The documentary very specifically cleaves out a portion of the population so that it is of more use to another portion. If you really don't care about computers or telecommunications at all, you will not enjoy it as much as, say, Desperate Housewives. I worked very hard to make it so it provides technical explanations where I could, but it is still a difficult ride for, for example, my mom.

Television really does take anything it gets and jams it into the lowest common denominator. Here is what they will have issues with:

- It's got "computer people" in it.
- The 8 episodes are not the same length.
- There is profanity.
- It is five and a half hours long.
- It is already released as a DVD.
- It is Creative Commons licensed.

Jason Kottke wrote a very complimentary essay about how PBS could take my documentary and put it up and save lots of money, since they'd only have to pay $50 and then they could rebroadcast it. It is complimentary, but it is somewhat naive (and I assume intentionally so). Lawyers who work in television, yes, even PBS, would be as likely to take a CC work and broadcast it without a sheaf of papers from me, signed and notarized, as you might be to eat a human foot.

Not only will they demand a sheaf of papers from me, they will also insist on a ton of sell-out aspects that I'm simply not prepared to do. They will want rebroadcast rights, reselling rights, distribution rights. They will want to clean up my oversights (the occasional boom microphone or the high-end noise in a couple rooms) and that's fine... and then they will edit out content or demand I make changes, or ask me to get rid of "difficult" sequences that people won't "get".

Here's a little story for you. I was interviewed last year about this documentary by TechTV/G4, for their Pulse news program. I was interviewed by Kevin Pereira, who had been a WWIV sysop in his early days, and absolutely loved BBSes, and was going to do a small story on them and discovered me. After a couple extended phone conversations about how this would go, we got along well, and planned for the crew's visit to my house (he was going to do a number of interviews that day in the Boston area) and we got it all arranged. Totally as smooth as it could be.

However, they wanted some example footage. In fact, their standard contract basically shared ownership and distribution rights of the example footage. And I had to sign this contract. Kevin was obviously interested in the subject personally, and I could tell it was all this legalistic crap that was out there, making his job that much more difficult, just to show a few clips.

So basically, I sent them examples of footage that were outtakes. Stuff I couldn't and would never use. And without a doubt, I am technically sharing ownership of that footage with whatever Skeletor's Castle owns G4. So I took steps to protect myself, but the fact is, I had to sign a few contracts to appear in a news story about a film I was making. Imagine if I was showing the film on G4. It is a nightmare I see no reason to go through at this time.

I could turn this into a rant, but I'll explain my position this way: I went to school for Mass Communications. I studied television, film, stage, public speaking, radio, and sound mixing. I learned techniques, theory, process, and many different aspects of these industries. Ultimately, as I got to the end of my college career, I started the process of going into "The Industry".... and I walked away.

It is so bad in "The Industry" that "The Industry" actually makes fun of how bad it is. And the worst part is, they're being favorable. No, it really is that bad. The amount of people working in a happy, successful life in the industry that aren't accompanied by drug use, empty nights staring at the moon, or the same level of self-awareness as a shark, is a lot less than you would expect. I have no interest in it, at all.

I am occasionally lectured rather harshly about how I'm "throwing away money" on various principles and stands I've taken. Certainly the Creative Commons licensing has gotten that reaction in some (private) quarters. Such it is with the Television/Cable idea, where people think I'm throwing away money if I don't get the DVD's contents out there. But they probably don't know that the television industry has had decades and decades to refine screwing people who "make stuff", to the present day where they consider it a great favor that they've optimized the screwing process to the level they have. And I don't just mean financially; I mean content wise, controlling copyright, distribution and then suing anyone in their way.

So no, I don't think I'm throwing away money.

People who make their own movies dream of what I've gotten to at this point: a completely-under-my-control DVD set, with the highest quality I could muster, unencumbered with meetings with "the studio" to "fix" the film, and lacking screaming phone converations with no-nothings deep in the bowel of a cable channel. I was able to add everything I could come up with, oversee its creation to my satisfaction, and then sell it (or give it, thanks to CC) directly to people. I don't have a mountain to scale anymore, I'm on the mountain.

Why would I work hard to jump off that mountain into a garbage pit?

Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled friendly filmmaker historian guy.

All The Podcasts: It Continues

It was 4 months ago that I announced I was collecting all the podcasts. I figured we were about due for a further update.

The main reason I mentioned this project on my weblog was because it was something around the tenth time I'd set off on a major collecting project, and it made sense to really explain the urge and the process and the ups and downs. In this way, maybe I'd be helping other growing collectors understand themselves or at least know they weren't alone. I generally toil in silence, so this was actually rather unusual; nobody hears essays of the process of running textfiles.com or my other little hobbies.

I should have known that putting the phrase "all of the podcasts" in an announcement would sent the pundit/reporting sharks into the water, smelling tasty verbiage to bring to screen and paper. As a result, I got a little attention.

OK, I got a LOT of attention.

BoingBoing took an interest.
Wired did a story on me.
Weblogs really took an interest.

I even got a nice little amount of whining from the wings.

But the high point was getting on NPR, not just once but twice. It is my dream to one day be interviewed by Terry Gross about the BBS Documentary, but sitting down in a studio to shoot the moon with Christopher Lydon is a real close second in those quarters.

All of this stemming not from the documentary project, but the fact that I was now basically downloading an amazing amount of crap. Such is the way it goes. Salvador Dali first got attention when he threw a bathtub through a museum window; we do what we have to.

...but that's the thing. I really don't have to, in the sense of commitment or need or job status or anything else. I am collecting all these podcasts because I want to. And that's important, because we're now at the critical 4 month period.

I find that a lot of projects die in the 4th month. In the case of high school bands or novels or other real-world projects, they just disappear. Websites and online projects are more sticky, because they don't really go away as easily. They just kind of drift, untouched, unwanted, but accessible at any time from around the world. It's like the world has ensured that the Junk Drawer will follow us as a race to the end of time.

That fourth month is critical to a collector; as I suggested earlier, I now have a metric assload of podcasts, yet it is not complete and it is not comprehensive. It is just a metric assload. It would be easy for me to go "no, no I shall never have them all, what am I doing, I should delete these and get my hardware back", but I'm not doing that. I'm plowing ahead, knowing that a big something is better than a big nothing.

How big are we? Well, people saw the quote of 340gb from the Wired article but that was sorely out of date by the time it showed up on their site; I am somewhere in the 700gb range and growing by gigabytes every day as I run my discoverer on various directories and sites. I just did some rough checks and found that I have 35,000 mp3 files.

This is somewhere in the range of nearly two years of talking. Roughly.

TWO YEARS.

That's a lot of shows. I am pretty sure I'm past 2,000 shows, but I don't rightly know. And this is something important to explain, as well.

I have now totally forgotten which interviewer asked me this, but he wanted to know how many hours a week I spend with this collecting hobby. He was audibly unhappy when I said "Well, none."

There's a machine downstairs. It is in a nice red case (I bought the case for $50) and has a relatively OK FreeBSD-running AMD box (I bought it for $200) connected up with five hard drives; four of them are 250 gigabytes and the system disk is 40 gigabytes. So it has about a terabyte of disk space or so available.

All it does is download podcasts. 24 hours a day. And when it's done, it downloads more. It's scripted. Completely scripted, and just jams through the RSS feeds, pulls a copy of the .XML file (and stores it, for later historians) and then yanks every mp3 file it can find in that feed that it doesn't already have. This whole process takes none of my time. So really, it is less than an hour a week. I think the last time I spent any time with that box downstairs was to check the number of files and the disk space. I'll probably automate that as well, soon. "Hey, Jason, here's how much crap I downloaded today, here's what you've got on me. Thank you."

If I was more emotionally invested in the output, I might spend my days happily glancing over my downloads, eyeing the best and the brightest, listening in to the spoken words of a thousand podcasts with glee. But that's not what I'm doing right now; I'm just collecting. I'm pretty busy with the documentary promotion and sales and distribution and all that, and while fleshing that work out, I don't have time to listen to radio.

Well, unless I'm on it. Then I make a little time.

A few people have made little whiny noises about the project, comparing it to their monetized business models and works; but that's completely apples and oranges, comparing Tower Records or HMV to a guy who's just buying out old vinyl collections at estate sales or going through bargain bins in the basement of older record stores. It's just not the same thing! We're not going to see a "Jason Scott's Podcast Emporium" opening up anytime soon, although I might make a way to download a list of what I've grabbed, so people can tell me of ones I'm missing. I'm all for being corrected on that line, as opposed to "where's your business model".

So I am continuing, plowing through hundreds of mp3s a day and downloading them to a bunch of hard drives that are filling quite noticably as I track down RSS feeds everywhere. These hard drives are being syncronized to other removable hard drives that are being burned to DVD-ROMs, by the way, in case you're wondering if an errant spark is going to blow my collection to smithereens. I wouldn't mind a situation where a few people were trading hard drives with me, so I could rsync copies of the collection for them. Libraries, where are you?

While we're here, I'll throw in a few more impressions I've gotten glancing over the collection and the processing that's been going on to make it:

I stand firm on my belief that the turnaround on podcasts makes my project still realistic. People just can't keep this stuff up for months and months on end; they do it for a while and then they stop. They just do. There is now a company/program about to come out called Odeo that wants to be for podcasts what Livejournal and the like are for weblogging. What they are going to end up producing are not going to be podcasts, really; they're going to produce one-sided telephone conversations, not unlike what you'd find on an answering machine. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but there's a difference between post-it-notes and essays (and books), and there's a difference between "E-Z-Make" podcasts and what I'm concerned with collecting at the moment.

There is a company called libsyn that is hosting a ton of podcasts, and are functioning as a sink for all of this data. I have no idea if they're keeping the podcasts long term, but they should, it'd be great.

Finally.... I'm having a blast. This was a great idea, and I don't regret it a bit.

And I was serious about Terry Gross.

The Dedications

This is the first of a series of documents covering stuff I consider "Behind the Scenes" or "About the Production". They'll range from analysis of the process of interviews, to trivia and other facts that aren't on the DVD. It's not because I didn't think them important or worthy of being on the DVD; I just didn't have the time to write all these additional documents out in a a timeframe that would have gotten the documentary out before 2006.

This is a bittersweet document; an expansion/explanation of all the names of the people the various episodes are dedicated to. There are eight episodes in all, and seven have dedications to people (the eighth, COMPRESSION, has no dedications because I thought it wouldn't be tasteful). Here are the stories of the people each episode has been dedicated to, with hopefully a hint as to why I paired that person with that episode's theme. All these stories are sad in various ways, and I'm sorry there's nothing I can do about that.

ANDREW FLUGELMAN
Episode: Baud

Andrew Fluegelman is in danger of being forgotten as one of the pioneers in the BBS and computer world. He was a successful attorney, programmer, and editor who left a strong mark on the growing computer industry. With the introduction of the IBM PC, he wrote PC-TALK, a communications program that quickly became one of the leaders in that growing market, because of his approach of making the software cost nothing, asking instead for donations. He called this "Freeware", and trademarked the name. Others who worked the same way ended up calling their similar approach "Shareware", a name that has stuck.

He was also an editor of both The Whole Earth Catalog and later PC World and MacWorld magazine.

In 1985, Flugelman was taking medication for Colitis, which was having a deep effect on his personality, with mood swings and depression. In July of that year, he was informed that he had cancer; he drove to the Golden Gate Bridge, left a suicide note in his car, and, it is presumed, committed suicide.

His body has never been found.

DUSTIN GILL
Episode: Sysops and Users

Like many young sysops in the 1980s, Dustin had found out about computers, then modems, and ultimately BBSes, and tried his hand at running one. His BBS, Beyond Reality, stayed up for a while, taking messages and transferring files with Dustin at its head, until he took down the BBS (again, like many others) for the Internet.

This story would not be unusual were it not for the fact that Dustin had experienced a spinal cord injury that paralyzed him from the neck down at age six. He had been hit and run by a driver while chasing down a ball.

For 20 years after, using sip and puff systems, he ran his BBS, attended high school and later college, and then graduated. He passed away in 2002, aged twenty-six.

TIM STRYKER
Episode: Make it Pay

Tim Stryker's technological achievements nearly eclipse his BBS work; at an early age he was already designing video games (like, full size arcade games) and created a networked game that worked cross-platform (Atari computers could play Commodore computers, and so on) called COMM-BAT for a company called Adventure International.

Stryker founded Galacticomm, and created a product in the form of a custom card that could run many modems off a single computer. To demonstrate the power of this card, he wrote some BBS software as an example.. and the software took off. Galacticomm's MajorBBS software became a hit, and Stryker had success along with it.

In the mid-1990s, he drifted away from technological pursuits to take on a much tougher problem: restoring the ideas of democracy, possibly with an engineering approach. He wrote a number of books about his ideas for improving voting methods and creating a better society, which he called "Superdemocracy". While his books did sell, his ideas did not take off, and he distanced himself away from his Florida company to live in Colorado.

In August 1996, Stryker committed suicide in the hills of Colorado. He left behind a wife and four children.

STEVE AHOLA
Episode: Fidonet

Steve Ahola was the Region 16 coordinator for Fidonet in 1991, running
a board called "IBM Tech Fido" in Pepperell, Massachusetts. Experiencing financial setbacks and other factors, he committed suicide on August 13th, 1991. Speaking to some of his friends and associates, there was some indication that he was facing the loss of his telephone line, meaning the end of his interaction with Fidonet, which may have been a factor in his suicide. Regardless of whether this was the case, his loss was felt throughout his online community and throughout Fidonet, and was ultimately commemorated in an issue of Fidonews.

Levi Dedi (NIGHT DAEMON OF ICE)
Episode: Artscene

Levi Dedi was a young man from Israel who had joined the ANSI Artscene and was beginning to make a name for himself. 1997 seemed to be his year; after helping with the organization of a demo party called "Ritual" (he was the Graphics competition organizer), he found himself achieving his dream and joining the ANSI group iCE (Insane Creators Enterprises) in August. But by October, his family life was falling apart, and his mother cut him off from the Internet (and therefore his Artscene world and friends) as punishment. Dedi jumped from the family's apartment window to his death, sending shockwaves through
his families, both online and off. The next artpack of iCE was dedicated to him and included artwork by and for him.

IBRAHIM "KAM" SHIRANI
Episode: HPAC

I often spend time on IRC, talking with many different channels, getting ideas and starting discussions (or flamewars) with people all over the world. One of these channels was/is a group of hackers and technical folks centered around the Colorado area (although their members were far-flung geographically due to life and jobs and other factors). One of these was someone I knew named "kam", who was (along with the channel) privy to my frequent updates and monologues
related to the documentary's production.

Early one morning in August of 2004, as my documentary was nearing completion, kam was driving home from a night on the town when his car rear-ended a van, sending his car rolling into a freeway where it was hit by other cars, killing him. I had spent time with him less than a month before at the DEFCON hackers' conference.

RODNEY ALOIA
Episode: No Carrier

Rodney Aloia was the sysop of the INDEX BBS, a 40+ line system that he had founded and built up from 1983. Based in Atlanta, he was a very popular board, and had built it into a successful business.

He was an enthusiastic skydiver, with over 250 solo jumps in a very short time.

But in January of 1998, preparing for a jump with smoke canisters, he backed up into the moving propeller of an airplane, killing him instantly.

For most Sysops, this would be the end of their BBS, the lines slowly ratcheted down and the system taken down in favor of other nearby systems. But something amazing happened: his users, friends and acquaintances bonded together and continued to run the system after him, as both a continuation of his system and as a tribute to his memory. The system still exists at indexbbs.com.

JOHN OLCHOWY
Documentary

The entire production is dedicated to my grandfather, John Olchowy, a farmer, policeman, soldier, and patriarch, who passed away in September of 2004, a short time before the documentary was finished. His photo is in the production credits menu.

Getting a Hold of Reviews

I have a lot of letters in my mailbox like this:

Dear Jason,

I cannot really put into words how amazed I am by the work you
did on the documentary. Never in my entire life have I ever been so
blown away. The music. The interviews. The information. Was all
perfect. I watched every single part of it. I was very very involved
in bbs's.. I ran my own obv/2 board for quite some time. I can safely
say that if it wasnt for bbsing I wouldnt know half of what i do
about technology today. Your documentary is something i will hold
onto for the rest of my life. I will show my children and
grandchildren it. I cannot thank you enough for this jason. You have
captured the pure feeling of what the scene was. Now anytime I wish i
can get those felings again.

ps- You made a grown man cry several times. GREAT JOB!

thank you!!

And there are a few weblogs that have reviewed the documentary, like this one:

Over the weekend, I watched the first two episodes of the BBS
Documentary and it is fantastic.

I figured it would be interesting to me, since I was active in the
Portland-area BBS scene, and was a sysop for a little while before we
all realized that the internet was the ultimate BBS. But beyond that,
I think it would appeal even to a wider audience. I'm sure there are
plenty of folks who don't realize there was this other thing before
the internet hit the mainstream. The documentary smartly even takes us
all the way back to the days of the telegraph to suggest that the BBS
was borne of that.

It is phenomenal that Jason Scott was able to put this whole
production together more-or-less by himself. The whole presentation
from box to DVD menus to music to editing to the interviews themselves
are top-notch and professional. The $50 price tag may seem high when
you are used to buying Hollywood-subsidized movies at $10-$12, but
when you consider the amount of work that went into this three-disc
set that is packed with goodies and info that just doesn't exist
anywhere else, it's a great deal, and a very important historical
record. And no, I'm not being paid to say that. :)

..so I'm not crazy. It's a good project, a good product, and people who are purchasing it and watching it are enjoying it. (People who are downloading it as well, I would hope.) In fact, I now have dozens of such acclaims and hurrahs, both as e-mail and posted in weblogs.

So then we get into the issue of the Reviewer as it pertains to a film like this.

I've not yet been reviewed by a "professional" reviewer, that is, a disconnected party who sits down with my film because they're assigned it or they have license to choose something to review and choose me. The review there might be a little different than these. But the thing is, even though they might not 'get it' or present it in the same bright adoration that my other letters do, they would be read by a larger audience who might be on the fence about it.

I am not overly enthused about the idea of the DVD set being reviewed by people who will trash it because they compare it to other films that are nothing like mine, and all the other sins of reviewerdom, but the fact is, the world needs reviewers. They slog through piles of media, picking out items (albeit arbitrarily) and then analyze them, so that even if you don't agree with their conclusions, at least they let you know what the heck you're getting into. So people need reviewers, and as someone with a movie, I know I do too.

I've sent out a bunch to potential reviewers, but no real bites yet.

I'll instead just mention the general negative reactions that come on livejournals and message bases and forums when they hear the details of this thing:

"Holy Crap it's five and a half hours long."
"Holy Crap it's $50."
"Holy Crap, it has to be the most boring thing ever."

To a person, it's basically what they say when they haven't seen it. Obviously, once a person sees it, their reactions are different. But this is why the website goes out of its way to explain what you're getting and what's on it, to get over that "hump". A good long review would also get me over that "hump".

An uneasy balance, but there we go, that's the reality. Let's hope I get more reviews out there. Feel free to put me in touch with people you think would help with that.

Why Is Today Not Like What It Was Like?

I didn't write this; it was submitted to me to go into the Historical Essay portion of textfiles.com. But I like it so much, at his attempt to not just recount his past but understand exactly what was so special about it, that I'm putting it here, too.

---

This document attempts to answer a fundamental question:

Why Is Today Not Like What It Was Like?

by TCV

formerly Sir Galahad, The Main Man (unsuccessful),
The Unknown, The Watchman, FEH!Head

The intro to Textfiles.com poses a simple question, right? What was it like
to call BBSs? And there are a lot of great textfiles within the section --
some of them like jail-house confessions -- that admirably explain what it was
like at the time of the BBSs.

It got me to thinking: What's different about today's online experience
that makes it different from yesterday's online experience?

There is actually a lot more different about today than you might think.
And what's sad for those of us who were there, there's quite a bit more that
just can't be recreated. Those experiences only exist in our memories and our
lame attempts to capture emotions in textfiles.

It turns out that answering that simple question ain't so simple.

Let's see if we can't figure out Why Is Today Not Like What It Was Like.

BEECHWOOD-45789

My friend introduced me to BBSs one afternoon during my 14th year. He
showed me the ropes: how you place a phone call to connect and login to
Paradise, or The Dungeon, or Dante's Inferno. He also explained how these "BBS
programs" ran on other people's computers. The board operators kept their
computers on all the time (!!) and the board answered the phone. It was all
very mystical to me. When I left that afternoon, he gave me a big list of
local BBSs to call.

And that's the FIRST thing that's missing from today's online experience:
single contact.

When you called a bulletin board -- unless you were one of those rich
and/or thieving kids -- you made a simple phone call from your computer to
another computer. If you had fairly good knowledge of area codes and local
telephone number prefixes, you knew where you were calling. This, at least,
allowed you to imagine where you computer traveled.

What happens these days? Well, if you dial a number at all, it's
certainly to some unmanned, air-conditioned room where a bunch of lonely
modems handle incoming calls for a bunch of online services. Believe me,
there's no pimply-faced guy there with some mean alias like, "Your Worst
Nightmare!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" ready to scare you with his might when next you
logon. What's more, when you request a website, where does it come from? At
best, a room with a whole bunch of servers that handle thousands of web sites.

Certainly there are PEOPLE behind all this technology. Someone is
creating that nifty community you log into every night.

But today's online experience loses that simple contact, the connection
of computer to computer, the single exchange between YOU and the bulletin
board. And, certainly, the locality of it is lost. When you called a BBS
devoted to your area, it operated IN YOUR TOWN, not on some server offering a
free month's hosting if you purchase a set of steak knives.

And, by the way, this is true from the other side, too. While you once
could watch someone login to your BBS -- and see just how lame of a typist
many people were -- you can't do this when you run a web site.

NO CARRIER

Do you remember dial-up? Yeah, I'm trying to forget it, too. But more
importantly, do you remember all that freaky noise the modem used to make?
That's the modem negotiating a speed so it can make the connection to the
Internet service. At least, that's my non-technical explanation.

Way back before 56k, people used to connect to BBSs at 110 and 300 bps.
The slower the connection, the cleaner the tone that came out of the modem. In
fact, way back when folks connected at 110 and 300 bps, you could hear the
tone beep-and-boop (the technical terms for modulate and demodulate) as
characters came across the line. (With the VicModem, one could pick up an
extension phone and whisper into the receiver, "liiiiiiiiine noooooooise,"
utterly destroying someone's connection. Now, THAT's COMEDY!)

As speeds picked up, it became harder to distinguish the modulation. That
wasn't a big deal, of course, because you got a super boost in speed. Still,
sometimes I miss the old, simple carrier tone. When the carrier perked up,
text was sent directly to your computer and when you pressed a key on your
keyboard and you heard the carrier beep, what you typed was displayed on the
other person's screen. It was an interesting technical experience that's
nearly gone these days.

FASTER THAN A SPEEDING CURSOR

Not terribly long after many BBSs upgraded to 2400bps, one long-time, local
stated that 1200 baud was just enough for anybody. What he meant by that was
as the ASCII scrolled on your screen, a typical person could keep up with the
1200 baud text without it getting too far ahead. While it's pretty obvious
that 1200 baud would not be quite adequate for today's connections, what is
missing is the simplicity of the text-only connection.

Web pages and emails are amazingly complex, and not just underneath the
hood. Seems like the simplest pages have lots of elements vying for your
attention -- Javascript, FLASHy objects, blinky banner ads, and oh, so much
more. It's yards beyond a simple screenful of text like we used to deal with
everyday.

What's also quite different is that even for pages that manage to be simple
-- like the ones here at textfiles.com -- there is hardly such a thing as a
"screen full of text." Text is much smaller these days due to the higher
resolutions monitors can display. I'm writing this in TextWrangler on a
PowerBook G4. I've set the background to black, the text to green, and I'm
soft-wrapping the text at 78 columns. It takes up slightly less than 1/2 of
the screen. This is a far cry from yesteryear, where 78 columns was the ENTIRE
screen. Poor bastards like me with their weak-ass Commodore 64 had only 40
columns. Vic-20 users? I'm not sure they were even allowed on BBSs, seeing as
they had a mere 20 columns to play within. ;-)

It's not easy to view things as they were, by the way. You can increase the
size of the text, yes, although at some point it does look ridiculous. You
could lower the resolution, but if you're on an LCD monitor, everything's
gonna get a little blurry. And today's operating systems just aren't meant to
work in anything under 800x600.

If you can force a 25x80 full-screen DOS session then telnet into a
telnettable BBS, you can get something close to the way things use to look.
But even that's becoming harder to do without buying old equipment! (*sob*)
COMMUNISM

Many web sites these days want community badly. There are thousands of
books and web sites that explain how to create, foster, build, and massage
communities. And when those things don't work, some web sites FORCE community.
(YOU WILL POST TO THE FORUMS!!) And community has done pretty well on the web.
There are THOUSANDS of websites with quality, busy communities.

It used to be that each local area had a handful of communities and while
some were specifically-inclined, a larger majority of them were general and
had strengths and weaknesses in one or more areas. Today's communities are
typically micro-focused. They pick one thing and try to do it the best way
possible. This ain't bad, but it has some downsides.

First, it's hard to be successful at generality. Some of the most popular
BBSs were "general." These boards typically just let the conversation go
wherever the users wanted. This freedom was meant to prompt the users to take
the wheel, as it were, and create the community. Many folks today will simply
pass you by if you're not trying to shine some light onto some topic
previously in the dark.

Second, there's a price to pay for your time. Just like you might have to
buy two computer magazines and visit four web sites to get a full story these
days, you have to visit several communities to equal up to what you would have
found on ONE popular BBS.

Third, redundancy. There are also a lot of repeat communities, so many so
that if one Star Wars community isn't working, you can always go to the next.
For this reason, folks have very little reason to make a mediocre community a
stellar one. That leaves a lot of web communities overrun with weeds.

MAH THREADZ

Reading new messages is something people have done online since the
earliest days. But Usenet brought a shift to the way people read new messages.

Why am I blaming Usenet? Well, there's no BLAME here, per se, but when
people started to read through hundreds of messages a day, folks sought a way
to easily jog one's memory as to which conversation they were following. Thus,
the THREAD view was born.
On the old BBSs, you typically typed "N" for "New Messages" and you were
brought to each forum only to read those new messages in the particular forum.
How was it determined which messages you saw first? Easy. Your last logoff
time was compared to the messages in the message bases and the data/time they
were published. (Heck, there wasn't much in the way of real threads with some
BBS packages; the whole of a conversation would ebb-and-flow, die and rise
again, as you read through the new messages. It was all very
stream-of-group-consciousness.)

Today, many web-based forums software, like vBulletin, force the thread
view, shunning the "show me all the new messages" view entirely. And some
packages really never show you the new messages, rather showing the topic
header with some graphic indicating new messages lie within. If your web
cookies are up-to-date and properly situated, then you'll be able to read the
messages that are actually new since you last visited.

I haven't found any web forums that do New messages quite like so many
years ago. I find it quite easy to miss honest-to-goodness, new-to-me
messages. A damn shame when community is supposed to be so important!

---

Let's try to wrap this all into one typical call to a typical BBS. I'll use
something closer to my experience -- a Commodore 64 and a VicModem. (Hey,
Apple IIe owners. I'm STILL JEALOUS of you, that's why I'm not using an Apple
IIe as the subject here. Nyah.)

The situation described is a BBS in which you called last night as a new
user. You've introduced yourself to the community and are hopeful for replies.
So, eagerly, you dial the seven digit phone number to Paradise/The Morgue BBS.
It's busy. So you wait five minutes -- which is interminable to someone your
age -- and dial again.

This time it rings! Click. A carrier tone comes over the line. And just
before you remove the handset cord and plug it into the VicModem port, you
hear the tone start to modulate.

^^$@#!L C O M E T O

P A R A D I S E / T H E M O R G U E

ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER THIS LOWLY PLACE
SYSOP: SOMEONE VERY MEAN. GRRRR.

You enter your alias and password and, after various promises of death and
stuff for those who would trespass against the BBS, you are whisked away to
the Main Menu prompt. An gets you to the Message Bases. A starts new
messages scrolling your way. In fact, here's your first message to the
community:

MESSAGE 43 OF 57
BASE: WARROOM
9/5/1985 - 1:17AM
FROM: MR. BAD
TO: ALL (EVERYONE)
SUBJECT: I AM THE MOST BAD

YOU HAVEN'T MESSED WITH THE BEST UNTIL YOUVE MESSED WITH ME. IAM THE MOST
BAD YOU CAN EVER DEAL WITH. JUST TRY ME AND YOU'VE GOT A WARRR!!!!!11

MR. BAD
LEADER OF THE PACK
"COME SAIL AWAY WITH ME, LADS!"

It doesn't take long until you see a reply to your inaugural BBS post!

MESSAGE 45 OF 57
BASE: WARROOM
9/5/1985 - 1:48AM
FROM: HELLS KEEPER
TO: MR. BAD, ALL
SUBJECT: I AM CONFUSED

HEY THERE, MR. BAD. THIS ISN'T SO MUCH A CHALLENGE AS IT IS HOPE FOR A
CLARIFICATION. WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY "THE MOST BAD?" DO YOU MEAN THE
"BADDEST?" CAN YOU PLEASE CLARIFY?

ALSO, I AM ASTOUNDED YOU WOULD QUOTE A SEVEN YEAR OLD STYX SONG AND AM
ULTIMATELY NOT SURE WHAT YOU WANT ME TO DO. DO YOU HAVE A BOAT? TO BE
SURE, I THINK YOUR QUOTE CHOICE IS A BIT ... AHMM ... GAY. IF YOUR
INTENT IS TO COME OUT OF THE CLOSET, THEN PERHAPS A MORE DIRECT METHOD
IS APPROPO.
ALL IN ALL, I BELIEVE THAT THE HAPPY FUN BBS WOULD BE MORE IN LINE FOR
YOUR DECIDEDLY NEWUSER FORAGES.

H E L L S K E E P E R

And so begins your online relationship. All the fame (and fortune)
promised by other BBS-calling friends will be yours soon, you think. You
respond with various threats, when suddenly, the cursor starts doing some
unexpected things:

SYSOP COMING ON...

HEY MR. BAD. I'M JUST TRYING TO HELP YOU HERE. I THINK THAT IT WOULD BE
BETTER FOR YOU TO JUST LAY LOW FOR A BIT AND WATCH HOW OTHERS INTERACT
WITH THE BOARD AND THE USERS. I KNOW THAT YOU'RE ANXIOUS TO GET STARTED
AND HAVE SOME FUN, BUT YOU REALLY DON'T WANT TO COME OFF TOO SILLY AT
FIRST.

You respond in a most unfortunate way:

WHO DO YOU TINK YOU ARE? I AM MR. BAD. THAT MEANS IAM BAD. WHAT PART OF
THAT IS HARD FOR YOU TO UNDERSTAND. IF YOU DONT LEAVE ME ALONE I WILL
CRASH YOUR BOARD. IAM ALSO AN HACKER OF SOME^@&**

That's when you hear a click from deep within your VicModem. And it sure
ain't long before you realize you can't access Paradise/The Morgue any longer.

Of course, silly new users are around as much today as they were back
then. Perhaps, though, they're more difficult to delete.

It would be interesting if someone were to take an old BBS package, port
it to Flash, make it fill a screen, and try to start a BBS-style community
around it. Perhaps, with the right visual and audio cues, it would even FEEL
like an old BBS. They could even give you the old modem sounds and mimic
good-old 300 baud.

That's an exercise best left to the more technically inclined and not
someone attempting to simply relay Why Is Today Not Like What It Was Like.
Indeed, I know I haven't captured all of the ways today is different, and I
don't mean to imply that Today Sucks. My hope is that you now have a slightly
better understanding of yesteryear as you read through the textfiles.

So You Warezed The Documentary

It's always a weird line you cross when you do this kind of stuff, but I thought about it and I added a donation page for the BBS documentary. Specifically, this is for the well-past-a-thousand(!) people who have downloaded episodes off of torrent sites.

You really have three choices when dealing with torrent sites: accept them gracefully and hope your product is worth buying even when downloaded elsewhere, bitch wildly in an impotent manner about how the world has become somewhere no longer to your liking, or become a complete raging jerknut with swords flailing trying to scare a billion people into buying your production using lawyers and bought-off-laws and subterfuge.

I've opted for the first approach.

The fact is, the DVD outdoes the downloads. With most of these downloads you get a single track of audio (no commentary), no subtitles, and no bonus material. You also don't get the DVD-ROM section with all the stuff in there. You get very little of the product. And the convenience! Even if you do a rip of a DVD, the DVD set of the documentary is over 17 gigabytes. That's a lot of cable modem bandwidth. And then you don't even get the kick-ass packaging!

But the fact is, there's some people for whom $50 is a hardship. And I recognize this. SO.... for those people, who are really content to stand outside the stadium and listen to the game instead of the full-on experience, I created a donation page.

Here's the donation page. I don't encourage any specific amount, I let people decide. And I make it clear they're not getting the full-on experience I worked so hard on. But at least they can feel they helped me a little.

But either way... a thousand people! All learning about the BBS! That rules!

I'm Shocked! Truly SHOCKED!

Well, finally someone turned the Documentary into a "ware".

I was getting a bunch of hits from a site with a forum, and after going on it and registering, I found that it was a torrent/tracker site with a forum for posting new torrents for download. As per my luck, one of the members of the "group" had made the announcement about the availability of my hot new ware:

hey, everybody! one of the members of team INFOFALLOUT here again.

we're back to releasing after a short break, with lots of great releases planned and a brand new member, who brings access to lots more great quality material!

now down to business...

you've read about it on slashdot twice ( here and here ), boingboing ( here ),you've read about it on various piracy news sites, and bunches of other geeky news sites- and i bet you wondered when it would finally be available for download... WHAT are we talking about?

BBS- THE DOCUMENTARY of course! ( http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/ )

this is THE history of online piracy. twenty years ago, before bit torrent, before napster 1.0, even before irc- there was BBS. text files were exchanged, ascii pr0n was swapped, and a great time was had by all. or was it? watch this 8 episode documentary to find out where warez piracy FIRST came from- and perhaps even get an opportunity to get back to your piracy roots.

p.s.- if anyone is curious, the first place we released this documentary was on a new age BBS style protocol ;)

it is INFOFALLOUT's great pleasure to bring you this great release complete in 8 separately seeded episodes as well as various extras from the DVDs.

episode release will be staggered, and this post will be edited as new episodes are released on bit torrent. we were planning to release them all in one big clump, we had some troubles with our ftp servers which distribute to our dedicated seeds, and we didn't want to make you wait :)

... and you thought that was old-school piracy? coming soon: the history of piracy on the high seas! (no, not really. just couldn't resist the pun ;)

HEY! we had a really dumb tracker problem, please download the new torrent. sorry about that, guys. all the torrents listed below are NOW the real thing. and they should work. sorry again.

episode 1... 332mb/39:20min/1049kbps

Sadly, they're kind of misrepresenting the documentary here, since as anyone who's seen it (and didn't they, while they were ripping it?) knows that piracy is mostly covered in HPAC and bonus material, not in every single episode. All I can think behind what they're saying is that BBSes are where online piracy came from, so you're learning the roots of piracy by knowing the roots of BBSes. I can buy that.

Anyway, I got myself an account on their system and posted the following helpful message:

Hi there!

This is Jason Scott, director, editor, cameraman, interviewer and general creator of BBS: The Documentary, which is the .torrent in question in this thread.

The documentary took about 4 years to make, requiring about 20,000 miles in travel, 200 interviews, 8 months of editing and a bunch of other sweat equity. It was a ton of fun and it was incredible to meet the heroes of my own past in person, ask them questions, and generally have a great time. I wouldn't trade any of it.

In the world as we have it today, digital media is easily copied, easily transferred, and from the point of view of someone who doesn't spend a lot of money on digital media, it makes no sense to purchase something you can get for free.

Recognizing this, I released the BBS Documentary under a Creative Commons, Attribute-Sharealike 2.0 license. This license is explained over at the CreativeCommons.Org website in greater detail, but it basically says that you can, with proper attribution, copy, share, mix, rip, change, reference and generally do with the BBS Documentary DVD anything you want. You can even charge money for what you do with it.

I wrote a essay on my weblog about my choice to do this, but I can summarize it this way:

- I made a kickass product, and worked hard on the packaging and DVD features
- I loathe threatening people with laws and stupid rules for digital media
- I realize some people will not pay, and I will not punish everyone for that

I mention this also because you have to realize the DVD set (there's 3 DVDs with 8 episodes) are released with no copy protection, no region encoding, and no silly menus you can't break out of. So INFOFALLOUT talking with pride about their "release" is not unlike someone delighted how much he saved on food because he was able to bring home two handfuls of sugar packets and ketchup from the local McDonalds. Bon Appetit!

The license means this creation really can't be "pirated" or "warezed"; it was released to the world generally.

So why would you buy it?

Well, for one thing, the packaging is absolutely kickass. On the ordering page for the documentary, you can see some of the package; it looks great.

Also, there are a ton of features this "release" is not giving you, besides the obvious ease of popping in the DVDs and getting some great episodes. There are subtitles on all the material, so you can understand people more easily. There are commentary tracks by myself for every episode as well (although later ones are mostly 10 minute "statement of purpose" commentary, since I figured 5 hours of commentary would be a bit much). There's also additional subtitle tracks with "non-technical" information on what people are saying. The people in this forum might not be interested in that, but it makes it easier to explain to the family what you're watching.

Finally, there are over 70 minutes of bonus footage across the three DVDs, including easter eggs and hidden tracks and all that. AND, there's a DVD-ROM section on the third Disc with additional interviews, photos, and artifacts you won't get with just the ripped films. And it's a good price for all this.. $50!

So enjoy the work; I spent a lot of time making it the best I could.

What a Week

I knew when the documentary hit the streets, I'd have to hit the ground running. I didn't realize the running would then continue and I'd never be able to stop any time soon. It's now been a couple weeks of release, and I am over here going in a thousand different directions, handling many related documentary issues, working harder than I think I've worked on anything in my life.

The documentary itself? I split the effort across years; I definitely was working every night for a good number of months, but the effort was progressive and I could stop and go to sleep and then wake up, and keep working. There were pre-orders out there initiating me to keep the pace going, but it wasn't a relentless torrent of needs. Now it is.

A lot of this is because I chose to do the distribution myself. There's pros and cons to this, mostly pros; I know the stuff is going out, is being treated well, and it's easier to handle custom or specific requests by folks (autographs, included greeting cards, and so on). A couple orders were skipped from the pre-orders because I transcribed them wrong, and a few people who got pre-orders that were hand-assembled got missing discs. In all cases, I did my best to make up for those screwups.

An aside about customer service: sometimes I can't believe what passes for treating people who give you money with respect. I recognize that for some people the $50 documentary is an impulse buy, but for others, it's a walk-outside-for-a-while, bring-it-up-with-your-spouse-for-discussion investment. I am not being superlative; I have recieved letters indicating it was a bit of a hardship to pay this money, and some people had to save up for it, as others might save up for a new stereo or TV. For that kind of personal cost, people deserve and should get the best response from me they can get. If they are missing pieces, they get the pieces sent. If they need a question about shipping answered, I answer immediately or tell them I need to find out... and then tell them as soon as I can. Anything else is unacceptable, to me or to the people who are buying this documentary.

I have recieved a good amount of online attention at this point; articles in Wired News, BoingBoing, Creative Commons Weblog, and a bunch of other places. I've had some interesting mails come out of these articles, including a lot of corrections on the data on the website, and additional information.

With each wave of publicity and exposure, a new wave of people hear about this documentary for the first time. I can imagine their reaction, which would have been mine: an open-mouthed, stumbling walk towards this unbelievable pile of personal history, presented in a professional package and ready to bring home immediately. This was the reaction I had when I found out about the Mindcandy Demo DVD, which was a personal inspiration for this project. There's so many projects like this out there for us, and getting the word out is tough. A bunch of online high-profile sites was relatively easy; it is going to be difficult for me to go in further directions. But I am trying.

I appear on Christopher Lydon's Open Source Radio this upcoming tuesday, talking about a side archiving project I'm involved in. It doesn't tell people about the documentary, but it does let them know who I am. I'll be doing a few more appearances during the year, including at:

The Deviant Art Summit

DEFCON

PhreakNIC

I'll put these on the documentary page and keep that updated.

So yes, my days are full, full of packing and shipping, of labelling and sorting, of getting yelled at by the post office, and recieving dozens of letters, thank yous and insights and wishes and dreams.

It is a very nice life I live.

Dream Becomes Reality: A Mail Call

The manifest/tracking information had indicated that my "appointment" to meet my freight was at 6pm on Monday. Imagine my surprise (and my choice of clothing) when in fact it was 10am. The FedEx guy came to my front door and behind him, a semi was blocking the road outside my house:

It seemed to make a lot more sense to pull into my side street instead of blocking a major commuter road, so he pulled up near the driveway, and opened the truck to reveal three pallets of BBS documentary DVDs.

I made a few desperate calls out to friends to maybe help, but the 10am time meant that basically everyone had a job or a previous engagement, so there I was staring at a couple hundred boxes of DVD sets in the driveway.

2 very energetic hours later, I had loaded these hundreds of boxes into the basement, ready to go into the eventual office I've set up in my attic for shipping and tracking orders.

I think we're now officially at the end of "production" and completely in the "sale" and "publicity" phase of the BBS Documentary. With 4,000 copies of this thing in my basement, I think the motivation is there to tell as many people as possible about this project, and get them out the door. Here's the physical side to the theoretical arguments I've made about creative commons and what people look for in a product. If I sell a lot, this pile gets smaller. If I do not, it stays like it is and I have a new roommate.

Regardless.

We have here, in box form, a dream I first considered back in the summer of 2001 and which I strove to accomplish in the ensuing years; it is, in other words, a dream come true.

Now let's see how many people share/want this dream as well.

Letter, Response

Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2005 13:31:02 -0400
From: XXXXXXXXXXXXX
To: sales@bbsdocumentary.com
Subject: BBS documentary

Good Afternoon,

I am the Media Resource Specialist with the XXXXXX District School
Board in XXXXXX. I am interested in obtaining a copy of
the BBS documentary for our media centre, but must first know
if the DVD comes with Public Performance Rights - the rights for
teachers to play the DVD in a classroom?

Thank you in advance for your help,
XXXXXXXX


Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2005 13:36:22 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jason Scott
To: XXXXXXX
Subject: Re: BBS documentary

I am sorry the world has come to this point that you feel you have to ask.

You may play it for anyone you like, you may make copies so teachers can play them in different classrooms or take them home and check them out for the class, and you can even play it as a fundraiser, if you wish.

- Jason

Egad

So I got the tracking information for the remainder/balance of DVD boxes of the BBS Documentary, which arrive Monday.

Pieces: 211
Weight: 2375.0 lbs.

Yes, that's right, 2,375 pounds of BBS Documentary. In my driveway. I'll get a picture of that.

Why the BBS Documentary is Creative Commons

I've been hemming and hawing about doing this entry, going over how to approach it in my mind, starting and restarting what statements to put in it, what comments to make, and so on. I get like this about some entries and this one is a pretty important one, so realize what went into it.

The BBS Documentary has been released under a Creative Commons Attribute-Sharealike 2.0 license. The "Creative Commons" movement means different things to different people, so of course you should check their website to get the full story on this, but I'm going to paraphrase it for my needs.

Creative Commons is a group of rock and roll lawyers who basically looked at the currently draconian copyright law and decided to back-hack in an alternative copyright that would allow various uses of content and material in a way that was clear and distinct for all parties. Whereas current copyright law in the United States basically says that if a child touches a CD without paying for it ahead of time, that child may be shot in the head.... creative commons says that the kid can go and play with the CD and make strange sounds with its content or add some beats or sample it or whatever, depending on the license. Oh, and you can't shoot the child in the head.

Like a lot of people, I am generally a content acquirer and not as much a content generator. I don't consider textfiles.com to be much in the way of my own generated content; I've probably added 10 to 20 megabytes of descriptive text to index about 2 gigabytes of text on the main site, with similar ratios in other sub-sites. That's just indexing. I've written articles and I've even been known to make a song or two, but that's nothing compared to the piles of CDs I've bought over the years. Therefore, from that position, it is very easy to look at current copyright law, shake my tiny fist, and go "grrrrr" like a puppy. What have I got to lose, right? So sure, free the content, open source the moon, give me, give me, give me.

It is an entire other situation when you look at something like this documentary; the four year production time I quote on the site and elsewhere is not fake; I started in June of 2001 and DVDs went out to homes in May of 2005. It really did take that long. And I really did spend upwards of a year of waking hours working on the project, from e-mails and analyzing essays and old files, to the production process of filming and travelling and interviewing, to the months of editing, culling hundreds of hours of footage into honed, informative, entertaining but honest authentic narrative. It was, basically, the biggest media thing I've made ever. It is also, at the end, for sale, a sellable product on three DVDs and a very nice package.

Like a lot of people, I am not entirely comfortable talking about The Money, but if you calculate my personal time as worthless, that is, that I don't include the actual per-hour cost of me doing this, then you end up with the costs of duplication and the costs of production. The costs of production include buying equipment, computer parts/hard drives, travel, meals, speeding tickets for trying to get to the next interview too quickly, and a ton of little sundry items like tolls, shipping packs, admission to conventions, and so on. If you add up these two sets of costs (and again, not count my time) we come up somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty thousand dollars.

Since the documentary worked out to an eight episode 5.5 hour collection, with 80 minu