In 2005, Jason Scott Sadofsky finished the extensive series BBS: The Documentary. A story told in eight parts, it's the tale of the pre-internet bulletin board system (BBS) culture where you dialed into message boards that were home to all kinds of information, software, coding advice, and even early hacking communities.
BBSes weren't quite part of the internet as we know it now. They were run largely as private services on private servers, requiring a specific number to dial-in and download the daily updates. Hyperlinking – the ability to link between different pages – would be limited to that internal BBS; you couldn't link between servers like you do today, from a Google search over to a Wikipedia page for example.
But at the same time, BBSes informed how the internet looked and felt. It served as early predecessors to the message board, establishing the terminology and lingo, providing an easy way to transmit images and software and, of course, a place to plan hacks. (Read Bruce Sterling's Hacker Crackdown to get a sense of hacking in the pre-Internet age.) The internet didn't invent computer communication and the concept of being online. It's all an outgrowth of the BBS, one with a better infrastructure for communication, and an easy way to render pages with markup languages.
The whole documentary is a giant labor of love, critical to understanding interconnected computers prior to a World Wide Web if you never experienced it first-hand. BBSes gave birth to a strange world and subculture, more clandestine than the early internet, with computer literate users providing a framework for the way online communication is still carried out today. A framework that lives on; BBSes are still out there, flourishing in obscure corners of computing culture, far away from the booming and buzzing of the internet at large.
This is five-and-a-half hours of deep, deep technology mythology, the sort of thing that not everyone can digest, but is utterly fascinating to those that can. So this weekend, why not watch a 10 year old documentary about 40 year old software? Here's part one. The rest can be found here.
Source: @simon_swain
