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Cinema: The BBS Documentary
Mon, 27 Jun 2005

He's been at this project for many years now, and finally Jason Scott (of textfiles.com fame) has finally released his BBS documentary. I remember years ago discovering textfiles.com and later submitted a few things from my BBS archives and correcting some info about BBS! Express ST, and even found the phone number of my old BBS in his files. Quite a trip down memory lane revisting so much lore from the old days.. One day his site mentioned he was about to begin on this new BBS documentary idea and I wrote to offer that if he wanted an interview I'd sign up any day (so I could brag about my Atari ST fidonet software and many BBS hacks :), but we sadly never did get together (my fault.. he popped by Toronto but I was out of city that week :( Just as well, since I was just a snot-nosed-brat in the BBS days, though I like to think I did my part for the scene. Heck, I still run a BBS, the worlds only online Atari ST BBS, so there. Anyway, with great anticipation I opened up the package I found in my mailbox this morning and I have to say -- this is cool stuff (and as you can see in the pics, it has sexy packaging.) My wife correctly points out that it sort of feels like those old physics educational videos you'd see in highschool - that makes me feel old, that this documentary is about something I was heavily into not so many years ago. Building an emulator to run my old BBS on so it can live on the net, and hacking the machine OS to support y2k etc.. that was months of work -- but I digress as this is Jasons story. Nostalgia always ropes me in..

The packaging is quite attractive IMHO, and when you pop a DVD into your player a good old carrier tone sequence is emitted. We all knew that had to be done and I was overjoyed it followed through (akin to seeing a new Star Wars film and spotting the scrolling text at the beginning. You know its coming, but all the same you're instantly excited..) There are three DVD's in all, each covering a number of topics from the rise of the technology, to boards going commercial, to the ANSI art scene - altogether some 7 or more hours of footage is included. I've not a DVD ROM player in a PC, but apparently the third DVD includes a slideshow of artwork of somesort.

I've only so far watched the segment on the art groups that worked on title screens and artpacks and was immediately pulled in. I've only had the discs a few hours, and popped them through the player to ensure all were good as routine.. but each disc suckered me in for a few minutes until the art segment extracted an hour or more from my life. I just couldn't put it down and now all I can think about is pulling out an old editor (TheDraw for other oldbies who remember) and hacking up some bad screens for my BBS that no one will ever see :) (Instead I'll work some more on my retro contribution to the latest PDROMs retro coding compo..)

Thats why this isn't a 'review' piece, and is hurried -- I'm too gushy in a retrogasm to write coherently right now. More later, when I've watched it all..

Jason - if you're reading - great job. We all do our part to keep the memories alive, but thanks for going the extra mile/lightyear!

Ah heck - maybe I'll go play Puzzle Bobble. (Yes, in the cabinet, not some playstation fake ;) Oh wait, my wife just noticed Iron Maiden is playing at the Molson Ampitheatre.. ah, we love the retro :)

Addendum: I should add for trivia sake -- being an ST nerd in the mid to late 1980's meant I didn't care so much about ANSI per se (though we all have the config.sys 'ansi.sys' reference burnt into our cerebellums) but instead cared about VT52 artwork that our beloved Atari ST's could natively render. Being the pragmatic underdogs we always were, ST folks always offered each menu and prompt in the board in several flavours depending on the dialup user's personal preference: 40-column plain text (for Commodore 64 users), 40-column Commie Graphics (for the C64), 80-column plain text (for most everyone), 80-column VT52 (for fellow Atari ST users) and 80-column ANSI (for PC's.) Earlier on most dialup users to my system were C64 friends and later ended up being mostly PC of course, as the PC continued its steamrolling of all other platforms. And boy I got sick of every rival BBS turning into PCBoards (that all looked and fealt more or less alike) ...

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