Jason Scott made “BBS: The Documentary” between July of 2001 to December of 2004. He filmed it using a Canon XL-1. He visited 30 states and one Canadian province. He shot roughly 250 hours of video. He interviewed 205 people.
I was one of the people that he interviewed. He came to Texas and took over 2 hours of video of me. Of course only a very little of that shows up in the documentary.
One day that entire video will be on the Internet so after I am long gone someone can do research and use that interview and they can check and get information from the other entire 204 interviews.
Jason Scott made a great documentary but he also has saved the history of bulletin board systems and created a great database of information that will be long after we all gone.
He also took 11 photos when he interviewed me with a digital camera. I do not think I have ever posted them all. You may have seen a few of them. I think it is about time for you to see them all.
He also allowed people to send him text comments before the documentary was burned to the DVDs (the documentary needed three DVD to hold all the data). Those text comments are on one of the DVDs.
Here is one of the comments:
“LaDawna Howard A special hello to my dad Jim Howard - and to the old Kansas City BBScrowd from the 1980's! My dad brought home a TRS-80 Model 1 when I wasabout 10 (1978). He started running a BBS on it not too long after. Heran one of the first BBS's in the country - about 1980 to 1982 and stayedinvolved for many years. As of today, he is still going strong on theinternet. HOWARD'S NOTEBOOK ran on the TRS-80 with a cassette drive, andlater a stringy floppy drive, and a 150 baud modem (later we upgraded to300 baud!), and about 48K of memory. I'm not kidding! Later, when I wasin high school, dad handed down to me a C64 running some kind of BBSsoftware (he was always experimenting), and I ran "The South Pole" BBS fora couple of years (about 1984 to 1986 I think). My dad told me that oneday nearly everyone would have access to this kind of technology, that youcould use it to communicate the world over, and that we would be able totransmit "the contents of a whole book in a matter of seconds" At the timeit sounded fantastic and wonderful. My dad and the early BBS crowd taughtme that technology is only as good as the people using it - that it is ameans and not an end. I also learned about the importance of open,uncensored communication and how it is an important foundation and pillarof democracy - and we need to continue to protect it. Thank you to JasonScott for doing this documentary. Oh - I guess this might also be a goodtime to confess - for those of you Kansas City BBS fiends from the early1980's - I WAS THE SYSOP NEXT DOOR. LaDawna Howard” Update: I did not check those photos before I posted this to see what size they were. I see now they are only 160x120 in size. Sorry about that.
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