Thursday, June 23, 2005

BBS: The Documentary

When Frossie came into the office where I'm camped out while I'm at the JAC, waving a DVD around madly and with some evidence of enthusiasm, I only vaguely remembered the Slashdot story about BBS: The Documentary...


BBS: The Documentary, a little piece of history...

But while her mention of a Slashdot article prompted my memory, it turned out that I'd missed the most recent article in May that the documentary was finally shipping. When I finally got round to Googling for the story I recalled about Jason Scott soliciting for people to interview, the vaguely remembered Slashdot story turned out to be from 2001, not late last year like I originally thought. Perhaps this means I'm spending less time on Slashdot than I used to now I'm reading news via RSS feed...

For those of us who grew up before the Internet, and can remember Bulletin Board Systems, and whose first taste of electronic mail was via the torturous intricacies of a Fidonet echo, this privately produced and distributed, 3 DVD, 8 episode, documentary is a piece of history carefully enshrined with love and great attention to detail.

Tim, Frossie and myself sat down tonight and we watched the first two episodes and the bonus features from disc one. We probably would have watched more but we had to keep pausing the episodes to exchange reminiscences about the good old days...

The camera work is good, production quality is high, higher than I've seen on some "professional" productions, and the meat and bones are of the subject are there, covered in detail. BBS: The Documentary is an excellent piece of work and I'd recommend it to anyone with an interest in this period of computing. Buy it, you won't regret it...

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