This piece from Wired tells of a new five-and-a-half hour documentary about those seminal chat rooms, bulletin board systems, or BBS.
BBSes were the blogs of their day and began sprouting up in the late ’70s, after the appearance of the Hayes modem, with names like Aladdin’s Lamp, The Puzzle Palace and Leprechaun Heaven, each one devoted to a different topic. Users and system operators, or sysops, compiled directories of BBS names, phone numbers and their topics.
Jason Scott, the guy who made the films, has posted a historical list of over 100,000 BBS.
In My Day…
Bulletin boards, Gopher, Bitnet, dumb terminals, acoustic couplers, dot matrix printers, Commodore 64, the perky square Apple computer…DOS…catalog cards and card catalogs, the blinking cursor against a black screen…etc.etc.
For some these are relics easily laughed at and dismissed…But…so will our “State of the Art” stuff be someday…
It’s important to remember Bulletin boards as precursors to email, listservs and chat…they were unique and enabled an exchange of ideas on
a diverse range of topics… LisNews is a perfect example of how BBS’s evolved to a new level…so we’re standin on their shoulders!