ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

5 Comments

  1. Lei Han says:

    Jason,
    I am the author of that blog post in Chinese you read. It’s about BBS: The Documentary, really. Let me translate it into English:

    4 years later, finally, Jason Scott have accomplished producing of BBS: The Documentary.

    In last year, when I was working on my book, Internet Media: A Textbook, I had searched on Internet for information about history of BBS. Website that gave most help was txtfiles.com. It stores mass amount of records by BBS users. Those records are all written in format of pure text, and keep track of things happened in times and locations.

    Owner of txtfiles.com, Jason Scott, who have a strong emotion on BBS time, had begun to produce BBS: The Documentary, which contains of interviews to over 200 people, including “father of Internet” Vinton Cerf, inventor of BBS – Ward Christensen and Randy Suess (he who have read my book would remember these two guys)… The 8-episode documentary is burned into 3 DVDs, and describes whole process of BBS history.

    Creative Commons license is used on BBS: The Documentary. DVD set is all regional, without copy protection. I plan to buy this DVD set, and organize a team to translate it’s substitle into Chinese (certainly in CC license).

    (Other paragraphs, rendered in green forcolor and black background, are translation of “What is…” section of bbsdocumentary website.)

    BTW, thanks to you, Jason. It’s Jason who keeps history of BBS. It’s Jason who awakes our feelings and memories on BBS. Thank you.

  2. Lei Han says:

    Hi Jason,

    Your SMTP server rejected my mail from Gmail.:)

    Yesterday afternoon I asked my friend in the US to order the DVD set for me. That guy works for Ericsson. Two or three weeks’s waiting is reasonable before the DVD set delivered to my door. Please send me subtitles when you done with other things (pack DVDs, etc.).

    Thanks for you email.

    Lei

  3. Frootloop says:

    Were there any BBS’s in mainland China? I bet there were some underground systems running, though we’ll probably never hear about them. (Would be an in line of research though.)

  4. Frootloop says:

    Were there any BBS’s in mainland China? There must have been some underground systems running, though we’ll probably never hear about most of them. Researching the history of BBS’s in non-democratic countries would be an interesting line of research.

  5. Lei Han says:

    Frootloop: There were at least 20 famous BBS running in mainland China before 1995, according to my research. Actually there’s almost no BBS running currently now. People like forums. 🙂