Jason Scott
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2019–2025
39:21 · 40K views · Dec 3, 2019
The first episode of Jason Scott's eight-part BBS documentary, covering the predecessors and beginnings of the dial-up bulletin board system. It includes interviews with pioneers such as Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, who created the first dial-up BBS in 1978.
HN commenters recommend the series as the definitive history of BBS culture and its Fidonet roots, especially for nostalgia and the origins of the demoscene.
6 comments from Hacker News
He also gave us the brilliant BBS: The Documentary this video GET LAMP: The Text Adventure Documentary (shot in 1080p) [LINK] and (apart from his many talks) his podcast "Jason Scott talks his way out of it" which is just gem after gem of documented tech ephemera. [LINK] It's baffingly hard to quantify how many people he (and all the other great people at the Internet Archive) has affected with his bullheaded conservation efforts.
Well, thank you a lot Randy! Great idea, good times... In case this interests someone, I recommend you to check out Jason Scott's BBS Documentary [ [LINK] ], and while the DVDs sold out, it seems to be available on his youtube channel [ this video ]. PS. adding a trailing dot after .com in the article URL saves you some trouble :)
If you'd like to know where the demoscene came from, look no further than The BBS Documentary[1] The whole thing started w/ cracktros in the 80s and through the artscene it eventually evolved into its own scene that was entirely disconnected from its roots in piracy. 1. this video
Some great nostalgia reading this. If you want more, check out Jason Scott's "BBS: The Documentary": this video
[LINK] >deepnet on Oct 6, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: Recording the Grateful Dead: The Culture of Tapers >The overlap between early nerd culture and The Grateful Dead was very significant. >Taping and sharing culture and its benefits were very apparent in many net forums. >As were democratisation of the new tools, public terminals with BBS access and the Deadheads community spirit exemplified on Usenet and Arpanet. >Look no further than John Perry Barlow, EFF co-founder and his Manifesto of Cyberspace - he was a Grateful Dead Lyricist ! [LINK] >Barlow's paradigm seems cheeky without awareness of the Net's public roots, how it came up through BBS and Fidonet culture, is forgotten by those who only saw the view of the Net as a gift from the ivory towers of academia and the military rather than bedroom z80 & 6502 modem culture. q.v. Fidonet BBS documentary this video DonHopkins on Oct 6, 2022 [–] >In another comment reply to Gumby, I mentioned how I often accidentally call them "Grateful Dead Conferences", because so many tech people I knew and worked with in Silicon Valley and the Free Software community and regularly saw at computer conferences and trade shows would show up at Dead shows. >The Raster Masters would lug enormous million dollar high end SGI workstations across North Shoreline Boulevard from SGI headquarters to Shoreline Amphitheater, and actually pack them into trucks and travel on tour with the Dead, performing live improvisational psychedelic graphics