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by harrigan 2389 days ago
BBS: The Documentary Part 4 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cm6EFYktRQ) has some great interviews with Tom Jennings & co. on the beginnings, growth and decline of Fidonet.

"It just runs in spite of the idiots." (Tom Jennings)

1 comments

Highly recommend this documentary and, especially, the entire episode devoted to Fidonet.

For those that don't know, the BBS Documentary is something like 6 DVDs and has hours of well produced and documented material and interviews.

Yes. A lot of pretty rare information. BBSing existed as a relatively niche mostly hobbyist community that was largely both decentralized and disjoint from the early, pre-mainstream Internet.

As a result, with a few exceptions like Jason Scott's textfiles, there was relatively little archived documentation/stories/archives about BBSs at the time and very little of that has survived. (BBSs pretty much all got shutdown at some point and there's very saved from discussions, especially outside of the relays.)

It’s the best! I wish there were more things like it.