Watching this documentary really brought back some terrific memories of using BBS's. Very nostalgic.
It kind of makes me want to re-install my board. In many ways BBS's were more elegant that web pages.
It's a shame they are virtually all gone.
Yeah. It's one of those era's in history where you had to be there to truly understand it. This documentary is very well done. Boy! Those were the days.
shareWatching this documentary makes me wish I was there back in those days.
shareMe, too. I got involved in BBSes in Seattle in 1984. I still have a listing of the BBSes in the Greater Seattle area (pretty much anything you could dial toll-free from Seattle, which covered a lot of ground). There were 20 BBSes then. 5 years later, there were over 2000 in the list in the local Computer User news magazine.
The comment elsewhere on the discussion boards here is correct: this really was all about the people. In Seattle, for example, there was a BBS get-together every Friday night at an all-night restaurant for years, where people would show up, hang out, drink coffee, eat, and generally have a good time.
I wrote 3 books about BBSes over the years. The last one was in 1994 and it was clear that BBSes were beginning to die out in favor of the Internet. An era was passing. I think the demise of BBSes was something inevitable, but I was very sad to see it go. It was a particular honor to be featured in BBS: A Documentary, and a lot of fun, too! I got to relive a wonderful part of my life and contribute to the history and memory of something important in the development of the wired world.
Yours truly,
John Hedtke
Author/Consultant/Freelance Writer
www.hedtke.com
How many are there now online (telnet) in the city? :) 0? :(
--
Ant @ The Ant Farm (http://antfarm.ma.cx) and Ant's Quality Foraged Links (http://aqfl.net).
Alas, *I* am no longer in Seattle myself, but I'd wager it's probably single digit numbers at most. There's really no percentage in BBSes these days. While we all have 56K fax-modems built into our laptops, I can't think of the last time I used any of mine. Probably not even in this century.
Yours truly,
John Hedtke
Author/Consultant/Freelance Writer
www.hedtke.com
www.tradebookauthor.com
Heh. I sitll have my old external 33.6k USR Sportster dial-up modem for emergencies when my cable Internet goes down once in a while. :)
--
Ant @ The Ant Farm (http://antfarm.ma.cx) and Ant's Quality Foraged Links (http://aqfl.net).
Agreed. I miss those days. :(
--
Ant @ The Ant Farm (http://antfarm.ma.cx) and Ant's Quality Foraged Links (http://aqfl.net).