BBS Documentary trailers

Published by Colin on 28th March 2004.

Jason Scott has been busy building an epic documentary about

the age of the BBS for several years now. He has finally reached a stage where he can tease us with a small trailer which, I have to admit, brought a pang of nostalgia to my heart.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d be the last person to regret the advent of the web and the expansion of the internet into so many homes, which did sound the death knell for the BBS along the way. But the concept of online communities which has always been put forward as one of the net’s killer apps was executed so much more elegantly by the BBS. That is the one single thing that I miss from those days. Usenet is but the ghost of what it once was and modem-based message networks such as FidoNet, WWIVnet or Rime are for all purposes best described as dead. Web-based forums which somehow seem to have all standardised on the same format don’t seem to be going anywhere and lack the usability and immediacy of their ANSI or ASCII ancestors.

So where’s that killer online community?