ASCII by Jason Scott

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 800×600.

If you can force a 25×80 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.

3 Comments

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!

2 Comments

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.

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!

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

5 Comments

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.

Comments Off on What a Week

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.

1 Comment

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

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

– Jason

1 Comment

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.

4 Comments

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 minutes of bonus, and will ultimately yield 100 hours or more of interviews that will be released, it is a bargain beyond bargains. But of course saying that is a shell game; it’s like saying “I saved so much money on this sale”. The fact is, I spent a lot of cash, and time.

So, ultimately, I am charging people for this documentary. I am charging $50. People ask me the material cost of the DVDs themselves and the packaging, and of course that’s a fraction. But it doesn’t count the other costs in making what goes on the DVDs. This price has caused some people to balk, understandably, in a world where you can buy “Dirty Dancing” for $3.99 in the aisle with the beach balls. That’s the nature of things. The documentary website goes into the full feature set and explanation of how great the whole thing is and why you should buy a copy, so I won’t do that here, other than to say, I’ve now seen the films over 200 times apiece, and I still watch some of them. For fun. But still, fifty bucks is fifty bucks.

Now, under copyright law in the United States, I have, as a content creator, an amazing arsenal of statutes and legal decisions at my disposal to make your life, assuming you are playing the part of someone copying my films without my permission, into a bitter fucking hell. I mean, a seriously bad, stinky, horrifying pit of suck. I can threaten you with years of jail. I can sue you in civil court while pursuing a criminal case against you on a state and federal level. If I am feeling somewhat kinky I can try and drag Interpol into the whole mess. And the laws out there, approved, let me attempt to have you put away for YEARS. Absolutely YEARS of your life for videotaping a copy of my film.

In other words, I have an enormous amount of incentive to be a jerk.

And yes, it’s so easy, having now created something that has the potential to cost me a lot of money, to reach out and want to use these tools for my own end. Even though, in my own high school and college years, I made songs that used samples from professional productions, even if I took screengrabs from films and put them on a website to make a funny parody in 1995, I see my own work and the temptation is there to go “No, this is different. This is my stuff and you can’t have my stuff without paying for it.”

But that’s not what I did. Instead, I stayed true to my belief system and licensed it under Creative Commons, giving away a lot of the tools that US copyright law grants me, because they’re are By the Jerks, for the Jerks, and should perish from this Earth.

It was in some ways a tough decision, because you want to “protect” yourself, but then you realize you’re not really “protecting” anything; all you’re doing is being a paranoid twitch-bag. And once you realize this, then it becomes a little easier.

Here is my secret 11 herbs and spices recipe for how I approached creating the documentary and then Creative Commons licensing the final work.

Create a really good movie.
I mean, just go overboard. Totally do as much research as you can, spend months working stuff out, talk to thousands of people on the subject, compose tools for tracking that information you gather. Get a mailing list with advisors. Film everywhere, do all the background filming, don’t blink when opportunities arise. Get footage like you wouldn’t believe, and then edit that thing for months on end until it absolutely sings. Then kick it in the crotch and make it sing louder and on key.

Result: You have a product that people respect.

Create some kick-ass packaging.
Find out what your printing company offers, then ask for a custom version. Take enormous insane risks in the creation of the packaging so that it has a unique feel. Use full color. Use photos. Get a professional cover artist to make you some custom artwork that catches the eye like a fishhook. Embed little messages into the artwork. Get artists from around the world to contribute little pieces. Find out what’s required to make the package look unique, and then exceed it.

Result: You have a package that can’t be easily reproduced digitally, and which represents a unique experience in owning it.

Make it easy to order and ask questions.
Use Paypal, Kagi, Amazon, whoever wants to sell it. Allow yourself to be contacted for questions and inquiries. Be responsive. Treat people who want to buy your work with respect and honor, do not cheat them or claim your work is something it is not. Allow them to see previews, to see what they’re getting. Be upfront and honest if there are delays and explain carefully what is going on so people who give you money are not in the dark and feeling like they were had. Share your pain and your happiness as the person working on your project.

Result: Customers will respect your work and effort and purchase instead of copying it, since it’s just as easy.

Be available for autographs and discussions.
Answer e-mail as quickly as you can. If people want you to autograph the package, be willing to do so, no questions asked. Go to places where people who buy your works are around, and answer questions/show them you’re a real person. Do not use agents, handlers, bodyguards, bouncers or an entourage to make people feel you consider them a “problem” in your life.

Result: People will know you’re a person who has sunk themselves and their spirit into the product.

Realize that some people simply do not buy media anymore.
Even if you are honest, open, friendly, making a kick-ass product and totally changing the world with your little whooziz, some people, on principle, do not pay for media. This is what they do and they have tools to get media for free, tools that are better than your tools are and which are much more ubiquitous and better updated. In realizing this, perhaps you will stop treating every single person who purchases your product like a scumbag, guilty until proven innocent, beneath and below you. A number of people do not pay. This happens at the circus, the rock concert, your local supermarket and at your job. To turn your customer base into a constantly-on-alert totalitarian wasteland is not the effective solution. Instead, assume that if you’ve actually made a unique, interesting product and put your heart into it and made something that can’t truly be duplicated, people will pay. And if you treat them like they’re human beings, they’ll ask other people to pay too.

Result: You save a lot of lawyers fees, and people feel like customers and not shotgun targets. Also, your breath will smell better.

You can see where I’m going with this, I hope.

The Creative Commons Attribute ShakeAlike license says, in effect, that people can copy, remix, sample, fiddle with, and otherwise treat the BBS Documentary’s content as one might treat a piece of fabric in your home: in pretty much any way you want, to whatever ends, including commercial. The difference is the usual digital magic that you can make endless copies forever, but otherwise, it’s just another item in your home and on your computer that you own, basically. The rules are pretty simple: if you make something using it, you have to also allow people to use your something the same way, and you have to let people know you got it from Jason Scott’s BBS Documentary. Otherwise, go absolutely nuts, kids. Do things without fear of being sent to jail (and jail is a horrible place, believe me) and improve and build on the BBS Documentary so that it has a place in popular culture and education for years, maybe decades to come.

It is incumbent upon me to provide something worth buying, that is, the packaging is nice, the printing was professional, my research site and my story are easily found, and the process of ordering copies is painless and easy. If I fail you, if I have packaging that’s horrible or indifferent (think of so many “re-releases” of old albums), or a product that’s not worth buying (think of 90 percent of the crap in the world) or I make it so you have to sign away 3 children to buy a copy (think of “Click-through agreements” and “shrink-wrap licenses”), then I’m not really trying to attract your business, am I? I’m making your life a living hell in an attempt to make my life heaven. Why should you go the extra step to pay me?

I hope that the ordering page is easy to use and clear on what you get. I hope the website is informative, fun, and intruiging to browse. I hope that my own story of creating this work inspires people to pay me for it. But I realize this will not always be the case. I am not going to set the world on fire because of it. Respect flows both ways, and I get and recieve it in my mailbox on a daily basis now.

Now, here is one important misconception I have to address, related to all this, and which naturally shows up when people hear about the Creative Commons license.

Just because I have Creative Commons licensed this documentary does not mean I don’t like getting paid for it.

I hope that’s clear. What I’ve done is say “I’m not going to be a jerk-nut and threaten and insinuate and treat you like scum and tell you what you can and can’t do with the DVDs once you buy them.” In another way I’m saying “I realize that some people will not buy them and watch them anyway… oh well! I am happy they are seeing it. I hope they might still consider paying for it, but hope is what it is.”

I’ve seen people say “He wants us to torrent it, he wants us to copy it and give it away.” Well, no. I don’t want that; I want people to buy it and show it to whoever they want and blow a copy to a friend who wants to see one of the episodes but probably wouldn’t buy it anyway, or to take it to a friend’s house and play it for a dozen people. I want people to discuss the stuff in it, remember the good times with BBSes, generally think about that history and maybe consider writing down their own or making their own documentary. That’s what I want.

What I will get is going to range wildly, and that’s fine; people who will buy it, will buy it. (And thank you for doing so.) People who do not want to buy it will not buy it. It is, literally, out of my hands. I will not thrash and cry as if this is a new situation in the world.

I’ve cooked up my herbs and spices as I’ve listed above so that it’s something worth paying for. I didn’t just do the least amount of work necessary for it to be considered “not a total ripoff” and then market the living crap out of it to flim-flam people into paying good money for bad product. Believe me, I see a lot of stuff where that’s obviously what’s going on, and it’s why certain parts of the world are jaded and misanthropic about being made to pay for certain products.

In one of my world-famous metaphors, it’s like buying bread. You don’t feel ripped off buying bread; you don’t go “holy nails, why is this bread twenty dollars? In fact, it’s stale! It’s not even BREAD. It’s some sort of “best of bread” with a couple pieces of other loaves of bread stitched together!” Yet people feel this way about media and other products all the time. I’ve tried to make a decent, good, solid loaf of bread here, which tastes good, is what it says it is, and doesn’t cheat you.

So there we go, a long-winded essay indeed, but I hope it makes clear once and for all my feelings about all this. This is all an enormous risk I am taking, one being taken in the pursuit of a principle, and people have lost livelihoods and happiness pursuing principles. On the other hand, some people have become quite wealthy. I wouldn’t mind becoming wealthy, and maybe all this work I’ve done with this documentary will make me wealthy. But even if it doesn’t, I know that I achieved what I achieved without throwing my audience and customers into a meat grinder. And that’s a pretty good thing to know.

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Here we are, wading into the deep waters of the selling phase of the documentary, and I’m doing my best to put the same work into this part as I did in making it in the first place.

Hundreds of DVD boxes have gone out; I’d put pictures up but they’d look about the same as the pictures from previous entries; big stacks of DVDs packaged into white boxes with labels on top. A few people have ordered 2 or more, and they get larger white boxes. One person ordered 20! He gets a very large box indeed.

The faces of the workers at the Fort Point South Station post office location now visibly sink when I come in with my death pile of the night. Sometimes, I’ve been able to get things together enough to have pre-printed internet postage on them (you have to drop off all your pre-paid boxes the same day you buy the postage, so everything has to be in perfect sync to do this). But often, I just come in with a stack of 50, maybe for the second or third time that day, and I take my number, smiling. And they call the numbers one by one, glancing at each other, wondering who’s going to get Jason this time. If I’m feeling frisky, I start to pretend to get up after each number just to watch them shrink back in horror. But usually I’m called pretty quickly and then I’m drafted in doing some of the process with them, like stamping everything “Air Mail” or the like. Yes, even at the post office, I’m working.

Throughout the past week, I’ve been getting reports from people getting copies. Some are in other countries, so the whole customs thing is working out for me. Some are down the street or a couple towns over.

Cross your fingers for me, but so far, I haven’t gotten a response along the line of “holy crap, it’s crap, no I mean really crap, this is crap”. Instead, people are telling me that it was just what they were hoping it would be. Never trust excerpts from letters by a guy selling the item being talked about, but here’s some excerpts:

“My buddy Mark and I sat with a few cocktails and watched the entire set over the last couple of days. Nice work! That was awesome stuff. I think you got just the right tone; appreciative but not overly-reverent, and interested (and interesting) without being gushy.”

“Well you’ve done a terrific job with what you’ve put together. To ask for a sequel at this time does seem to be a bit much to ask, especially with all the work and effort you’ve gone through to put together this set. What can I say though, I’m tremendously excited that somebody’s finally done this and I’m already screaming “MORE, MORE!!!” :-)”

There’s a few dozen more like that. You can imagine how good it feels for me to know that people are coming home or getting into work, finding a nice package with “BIS Productions” on the label, opening it, and finding a glittering DVD box with a big logo on it, inside of which is a massive set of films about bulletin boards. It is what I would have wanted to find myself on the internet and ordered without a moment’s thought.

Watching the first episode of Motorcycle Mania (the documentary that started the shooting star of Jesse James of Monster Garage) got me re-interested in the documentary form, but it was another project which got me thinking that I could do it myself.

That was a project called Mindcandy, which is a top-quality work by the members of the demo group Hornet. It contains full-quality versions of old PC “demos”, which are basically homegrown pieces of software that do incredible tricks with graphics and sound in real-time. Be rest assured, the way that some people heard about my project and went “MUST HAVE NOW”, I did the same with this project.

I started interacting with the creators, and helped get them mentioned on Slashdot, which helped sell a few. After talking with them, I got inspired to think I could maybe do a DVD project myself.

In fact, I used the same DVD production house they did, Bullseye Disc. Curtis, Shelby and Dawn of Bullseye have been dealing with me for over a year as I put this project together, talking wildly about doing a three DVD-9 set with 8-panel digipak, which, trust me, is like walking into a car dealership and going “yeah, give me the Saturn V Rocket”. They informed me, helped me make decisions, took my money and in return let me take literally business days of their time with a thousand insane details. They took it all in stride and in fact the final product is even better than what my initial plans were. That’s good work, right there.

Jim “Trixter” Leonard of Hornet helped with the DVD itself by answering all of my nail-biting questions on formats and interlace and region encoding (or lack of). He also went over the episodes with a fine tooth comb and helped me clear out a ton of weirdness and errors; for this he earned the nickname “The Eye of Doom” and has a credit in the production notes as a result. He wasn’t the only one helping me on all these levels, either, let me be clear.

So you see how one project inspires another and then inspires another. I hope, down the line, that someone will see this documentary and go “Wow, I bet I could do that, and better.” and some subject, some narrative story out there will come into being where before it might not have. They’ll contact me, I’ll tell them everything I know, and they’ll go to the next level. That’s how it works in the world. Inspiration, improvement, innovation.

Would I like to sell a million of these? You bet. Is that the overriding reason I did this? No. I did this because I saw a dearth of information, a lack of story being told of the human side of the bulletin board system and the unique social aspects of it, and I thought I could put together a film or set of films that would tell that story and fill an incredibly huge void. That void is now filled. People can, at least, go “yeah, it was like in the BBS documentary, but there was this part and this story as well.” This way, people can tell more of what’s going on without getting trapped up in trying to explain what a BBS was in the first place.

Similarly, I do not think it should stop with my film being the end-all be-all of this story: I hope there are BBS documentaries to come, told by others with other points of view (you can’t make a documentary and not edit in a point of view) and which will take the body of knowledge even further. There’s a lot of material in this story, far beyond anything I could have done with my five and a half hours.

If you bought this documentary already, and you think it’s good, please spread the word about it. What I see out there in many cases is skepticism that this thing could be at all worth watching, and as people are finding out, it is worth watching. The more people who know, the better to getting this project out to the folks who didn’t know it was done and who will be floored and delighted such a DVD set exists.

More soon.

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I browse the referrers to the BBS Documentary site. OK, that’s not accurate at all. I pore over the referrer logs of the site with the help of scripts and track down anytime anyone talks about the documentary. I made these scripts a good while ago and so it’s effortless to go between them and see what people are saying.

Some people are simply saying “I want.” Others are linking to it and reviewing the copy they got. I like to read those.

One of them was an invitation to a bunch of friends to come watch the documentary. I love this. Here’s the invite text, with identifying marks all removed:

From: XXXXXXXXX
Location: IXXXXXXX’s House
When: Friday, June 3, 7:30pm

You can find out more about the documentary by going to http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/

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