So where can one order this from?
David Barnes
davebarnes AT adelphia DOT com
OpenVMS , Tru64 , Solaris , Linux , OS X , SGI Irix
On May 27, 2005, at 2:39 PM, Jim Leonard wrote:
Computer Collector Newsletter wrote:
A bunch of people already saw it at VCF 7. I
couldn't be there
last year.
Anyone who saw it care to offer some thoughts?
What was presented was a rough cut of one episode only; there are 8
in the DVD set. I was the post-production quality tech, so I've
seen the entire thing already in nearly-finished form. It's over 5
hours of material divided up semi logically into episodes (birth of
the BBS, death of the BBS, social interaction between user-user,
sysop-sysop, sysop-user, the "art" scene (drawing pictures using
only ASCII), etc.).
I can't give it a proper review, because what *I* want from a BBS
documentary has no niche and will never be produced (I want
technical details and lots of inside geek info). What Jason
produced is for his target audience, which is 18-35 people of today
who barely remember (or never knew about) BBSes, for which he
delivers an outstanding product. I'm not saying it lacks meat --
there is definitely a lot of meat -- but it is slanted toward
people under 50, so it rehashes a lot of info that we already
know. The most interesting segments are the ones involving social
interaction (how BBSes enabled interaction between people who would
normally never connect, etc.).
It is easily worth the $50 price and I highly recommend everyone
here purchase a copy. In addition to 5 hours of edited material
(for which there was 240 source hours of interviews), the entire
set has a Creative Commons license, so that alone is worth supporting.
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at
oldskool.org) http://
www.oldskool.org/
Want to help an ambitious games project? http://
www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://
www.mindcandydvd.com/