From: "Jason Scott" Subject: Response to News Posting Date: Friday, October 14, 2005 2:02 AM Hey there. I decided I'd finally give you a response to the news posting on Synchro.net, since I have the production/directing side to draw from. You can put it up or not put it up, I'm fine with it either way. > There seems (to me) to be an unbalanced coverage of the eras, scenes, > elements and aspects of BBSing. > > Examples: > > FidoNet is covered in great detail (the interviews with Tom > Jennings are some of the best), while no other message networks are. > Certainly RelayNet (RIME), ILink, and other BBS networks that have > survived to this day (even DOVE-Net) deserved some mention. Even a > blurb about how FidoNet technology is used to drive dozens (or even > hundreds?) of other unrelated networks, would've been a powerful point > to make. Discussions of other BBS networking technology (WWIVnet, > PostLink, QWK, etc.) would've been cool as > well. I tried to jam this in a half-dozen ways and failed. The problem is that it is difficult enough in Fidonet's near-hour-long narrative just to get all the characters straight and the story going. Explaining that there were other parallel networks, also functioning like Fidonet but also not functioning in the same way, just confused the issue. A lot of the core Fidonet story, like the other episodes, are about the people, not the technology. While the technology is amazing on its face, I don't know if the documentary format can effectively call in the "alsos", which engineers generally want to include. The way I've tried to end-run around this problem is to create the BBS Documentary Library (http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library) which contains a TON of subjects not covered in the documentary. Things like Ham Radio BBSes, Satellite BBSes, KKK BBSes... various legal and political fights that arose. Raids, Busts, and Piracy Rings. Basically, for all the hundreds of subjects that made it into the BBS Documentary, another thousand subjects are not, and I'd like to have those online, available freely, to augment the work. > There is not a single mention of the programs we actually used to access > BBSes. Certainly users were as "religious" about their terminal programs > as sysops were about their BBS software! Discussions about or interviews > with the authors of some of these programs would've been really cool. > Without terminal software, users would have had no way to access BBSes. John Friel III was on board to be interviewed, but schedules and trips as I had them arranged, made me have to cancel. He was sad and so was I. That said, the problem is that terminal programs were very abstract, and so without all the authors, it was difficult to figure out how to portray that. You'll notice that in fact BBSes make very little appearances in these episodes! I instead focus on the people, because I think you can bring in shots of screens and printouts all day, but it's the people behind all this that make it all 'click' as to why the BBS hobby/business was of any interest at all. > There was some mention of door games, but very little. I think > MajorBBS/WorldGroup really had some cool games. MajorMUD is still very > popular to this day (one of the sole reasons to run a WorldGroup BBS > today) and gets no mention. Door authors had as much to do with the > success of BBSes as the BBS authors themselves and should have gotten > more recognition. The game-specific terminal programs of the day (e.g. > GWTerm and TradeWars) deserved mention as well. I mentioned Door games in SYSOPS AND USERS. I portray the interest and the emotional reactions people had to playing turn-based systems and how they integrated with the boards. I don't list all the programs because there were many dozens. What you see is what came out of the dozen or so interviews that mentioned door games. > Multi-user real-time chat seemed to get no mention at all. Yes, > BBSes were doing this years before IRC existed! Another issue of running into how to portray that beyond what is already in the documentary. You'll note that the SYSOPS AND USERS episode, as well as a number of others, is about 10 steps behind you -- I have people who are talking about marvelling about the entire experience of being online, period. In fact, a lot of the films/episodes are about the wonder of online life, and people revelling in that; a level of interest and innocence to the whole process. I do not get overly, crushingly technical with additional features that were available. There were programs for the Apple II that let you do bi-directional file transfer accompanied with during-transfer chat for the two people trading disk images. There's ATASCII art scenes, there's Orchestra-80 musicians (I spoke to one but couldn't find others), there's diversi-dials (another one I had a bunch of footage on), and it came down to how the editing played out, so the whole thing was watchable. Sometimes, the calls came in a way people have been surprised by (the sequence on the 8-bit computer wars) and others have been left out. > BBS Software > I think at the very least having the known BBS packages listed or > mentioned or debated by the users or sysops of those packages would've > been cool. I feel sorry for those BBS authors that will watch this and > feel like their contributions weren't noticed by history. > > It's not surprising that the big commercial packages (TBBS, PCBoard, > Wildcat, and MajorBBS) were well represented, but there were so many > thousands of BBSes running other programs. The "old school" packages > (Fido, Opus) got plenty of mentions, but how about their natural > successor, Maximus? Or AdeptX? I thought the WWIV->Telegard->Renegade > heritage was a particularly interesting story that should've been > covered. To get Wayne Bell's thoughts on that would've been cool. And > the lineage of the Forum hacks of the day (complete with screen shots) > would've been cool. GAP, SpitFire, RBBS, RoboBoard (and Robo/FX), > GTPower, PowerBoard, ProBoard, Remote Access, TAG, TurBoard, Falken, > TriBBS, etc. Obviously, there are hundreds of BBS packages, and I'm > honored that Synchronet had at least some part to play in the > documentary (thanks to my brother, Mike), but over-all, I feel the > coverage had some tunnel vision and seemed to focus on the BBS software > of ancient history, where Synchronet really doesn't have much of a > story. I have to put my foot down on this one. As shown on the software.bbsdocumentary.com site, there are hundreds and hundreds of BBS software packages out there. I contacted probably 100+ of the authors of these packages. Of these, some (like yourself) were willing to be interviewed. Some were simply unfindable (they wrote under aliases or have no contact information). Some were findable and said "no, no way". Others were available, but scheduling messed up our chances (this is how Dan Plunkett is not in the film). With so many subjects to cover (remember, we have hacking, fidonet, BBS industry, early history, art scenes, and so on), I couldn't just ovelroad with any one set of folks to the detriment of others. And I was very intent and insistent that this NOT be a film with just "figures". I wanted regular people in there too. As such, you can't look at this film as being a decision on who was "worthy". You're looking at it like an engineer: there are X amount of subject types, you are listing these subject types, therefore you should have either X or very close to X subject types in the final work. And it just can't work that way: the film would be complete, accurate, and totally unwatchable, easily 24+ hours. And the people would be saying VERY similar things: there would be swaths of BBS authors saying they wrote the software for fun, other swaths talking about selling copies, and yet more swaths talking about how they didn't like writing their stuff after it started to get sold. Wayne Bell was not actually interested in being interviewed, and it took some persuasion to convince him to do it. In the interview, there wasn't a lot of subjects covered simply because he didn't recall them; he'd moved on from BBS software almost ten years earlier and had lived a full life since then. He had little recall of a BBS industry, of fidonet, or even too much of WWIV's own network. We got an hour of interview done and that was about it. So it's less tunnel vision than simply the nature of interviewing people: you get some people, you don't get others. It's not a popularity contest; it's an accessibility contest. > Innovation > > Someone watching this documentary would easily get the impression that > BBSes stopped progressing in the late 80s or early 90s. There's no > coverage of RIPscrip, WIP, MaxGraphics, NAPLPS, or the other attempts at > a graphical online BBS experience, predating the web. SearchLight's > author got plenty of screen time, but said nothing about his attempts > at a better BBS user experience through graphics (RIP, and then HTML). > There's no coverage of BBSes that advanced past 16-bit DOS systems, and > the advantages those systems offered their users and (especially) their > sysops. Nothing about the advancement from single-process/user systems, > to networked systems, to DESQview, and later true 32-bit multi-threaded > OSes. There was really no mention of the Telnet/RLogin BBSes of today, > just vague references to how the "days of dial-up BBSes are over" > (which I agree), but BBSes live on under other (unspecified) > technologies. This one I will cop to. It came down to there being three places such "proto-web" technologies would be gone into: the MAKE IT PAY episode, the NO CARRIER episode, or a third episode dedicated in some way to subject matter that would include this technology. It came down to the fact that MAKE IT PAY got enough ground to cover with just the experience of a BBS industry, NO CARRIER was focused almost from the beginning of the narrative to "what the heck happened to the dial-up BBS", and there simply wasn't the time to create another episode. I could see, looking back, a potential way that I could get something into NO CARRIER, by talking more about the bridging going on in terms of the experience, but I felt in an editing/flow way (and this was just my opinion) that a lot of that feel was covered with EXEC-PC and the others talking about bringing in the Internet onto their BBSes and how the Internet side would just take things over. I do not recall footage specifically talking about the RIP/NAPLPS, and others in any depth such that I would be able to fashion a sequence about it.... but I could be mis-remembering that. There about about 3 or 4 other "episodes" that had potential of coming into being, and one was possibly to be the technologies/experience side of things that you are referring to, but it was a matter of time; just bringing the 8 episodes you saw into a smooth flowing shape was between seven and eight months of solid editing. I had to stop somewhere. Since I'm releasing all the raw footage under Creative Commons, it's entirely possible for someone to do it using my stuff... or make another one! > Probably the one that "got my goat" the most was the quote "Today, there > are a few hundred BBSes in the world". I'll assume that quote was > written around 2002, and even then, there were easily 300 Synchronet > BBSes alone. If Synchronet runs ten percent of the BBSes, world-wide, > that'd still be 3000 BBSes in the world, total. And I'm willing to bet > there are still more than that. It's obvious Jason was trying to make a > dramatic point about the decline in the number of BBSes over the years, > but I find the exaggeration of statistics for dramatic effect slightly > offensive. Here we come to a fundamental misunderstanding. And there's no specific fault in any side to it. When I interviewed you, I was just at the beginning of the production. I was still gathering data, still gathering research, not 100% sure what was going to be covered and what was not. So there wasn't really any way for me to tell you what the film was going to "be" and there was no way for you to know to tell me what should be covered specifically. We did our interview (an EXCELLENT interview, one of my favorites) and that was that. Two years later, as I'm putting it all together, my thoughts have now settled, and I am of the opinion (at the time of editing) of two points which you may or may not agree with. - Dial-up BBSes and Telnet BBSes are different animals, not unlike the difference between travelling by boat and by car, or maybe more accurately by car or by airplane. - The dial-up BBS's experience (even up to the "end" where they were being subsumed into internet/telnet-based mediums and large multi-line affairs) was a unique, different experience to telnetting in. And while there are now telnet and web-accessible BBSes in great, large numbers, they are, fundamentally, not the same thing. Taken this way, this "bias" if you will, my statements are not exaggerated, and are not meant to decieve or to hide the "truth". They're what I found in research at the time, given the parameters as I just stated. I am, however, entirely prepared to admit this is not clear at all to people who currently use web forums and BBSes that the documentary does not cover them, or consider them the subject of the documentary. And if you go in thinking, as you do, that BBSes are BBSes regardless of connection, then yes, the whole thing seems like some weird huge lie that avoids the facts of life. I don't agree, and the documentary has paid that price in terms of focusing on dial-up BBSes. > Post Mortem > > I also don't understand the complete lack of coverage of BBS technology > and usership today. He refers to the BBS sysops of today as "Holdouts", > running some old antiquated system that no one calls (which is accurate > in some cases). But he completely failed to document the technological > advancements of Synchronet and other modern BBS packages (e.g. EleBBS, > Mystic, BBBS, MBSE, even WINServer) that have leapfrogged the BBSes of > yesterday by so much and the activity of these systems *today*. Right > this moment, there are users using Synchronet (and other) BBSes all > over the world. And their sysops are having fun running those BBSes! > > Just because BBSes are dead to Jason, does not mean they are dead to > everyone. My attitude is that these modern implementations of the BBS idea and technology do not need my help and didn't need any "promotion" to be known. They live, they are of today, and they are growing and changing and integrating AJAX, RSS, API publishing, and a bunch of other innovations that are coming in day by day. They have forums to discuss themselves, places to be covered, and more accurate sources of information than a static DVD could ever hope to mention. To that end, the documentary is what it is meant to be: a history of the dial-up BBS, which does not have any way to show its current innovations, because they have slowed down greatly. You yourself aimed Synchronet away from modems some time ago, as has pretty much everyone else. Dial-up BBSes are dead to me. BBSes are not.