Holy cow! A 5-hour documentary about BBS, and I watched it through.

[Mr.Nobody]

In fact, it's more about the people who used to use BBS. Some of those folks have a hoard of vintage stuff that will make LGR drool...

[Ir0n]

I think we watch the same stuff. Lol who all do you follow on youtube?

[snuci]

That was a great documentary. I saw it sometime back. I think I'll have to watch it again.

[Engicoder]

I agree, this was a great documentary. Brought back fond memories of my nights online with the local BBS back in the mid 80's.

[XMIT]

The BBS was just before my time. By the time I managed to get online (by finding and fixing discarded computers in the mid to late '90s as a teenager) AOL was popular so I used that.

[Mr.Nobody]

To westerners, BBS is the thing before internet, however, BBS and Internet came to China at almost the same time, to Internet users of China, BBS simply means pure-text-based forums on the Internet, and only remained popular for a relatively short period of time,before everybody noticed anything the broadband came into the show and BBS got superseded by typical forums which are still quite popular today...

[seebart]

Nice, you may also enjoy this Mr.Nobody:

In 1982, People Were Streaming Games On Satellite

http://kotaku.com/in-1982-people-were-s ... 1794044617

[Mr.Nobody]

@seebart
"On Satellite" refers to some kind of service or the real thing in outer space? If it's the latter, I wonder what the cable bill might look like at the end of the month...a lavish way of playing games I dare say.

[seebart]

@seebart
"On Satellite" refers to some kind of service or the real thing in outer space? If it's the latter, I wonder what the cable bill might look like at the end of the month...a lavish way of playing games I dare say.

No satellite television was and still is quite common, streaming these games in the 1980's was rather rare though from what I understand. Of course these games were tiny compared to today's GB's.

[Findecanor]

There is still a teletext service on the TV channels over here but they have only very blocky graphics and the few games that are have no interaction other than typing in a page number on a remote control or pressing the "Show hidden text" button. The bitrate is very low - only a portion of a 40×24 character page is transmitted every frame. Decoders in modern TVs tend to decode and cache an entire channel's pages for fast retrieval - but changing page on earlier devices was sloooow.
Before the Electronic Program Guide, teletext was the way you checked the TV program schedule.
I last used teletext this last Tuesday to read the morning news because it was a national holiday and no morning paper in the mailbox. I still find that more convenient than wading through ads, huge images, paywalls and logins on the Internet.

I was active on Swedish Amiga BBS:es during the mid-90's. I got my first 2400 bps modem at Christmas in 1991. I was "co-sysop" (moderator) on a few boards. Through BBS:es, I got into the demo-scene.
The Amiga 1200 I bought used in '94 (??) had been used to run one of Sweden's most popular Amiga boards. Later on my activity was mostly sporadic logins at the Swedish Usergroup of Amiga's BBS directly on the Amiga 2000 that it ran on (It had a Cherry keyboard BTW!!!) at the makerspace where it was located (before the word "makerspace" was invented).
At the late end of the 1990's, some text-based BBS:es moved to Internet and were reachable via telnet.

[Mr.Nobody]

This documentary tells me one thing at least, the cyber stalking shit has a history even longer than the Internet itself. Some people get so personal online, they argue about trivial things and get really pissed off and follow the guy(s) they don't like try to transform him/them into someone(s) they like, or punish him/them for being someone(s) they don't like. Try to change a person is like trying to rebuild Rome in one day...don't do that, it's frustrating...

[Mr.Nobody]

This reminds me of Mack the Knife