 Defcon 12 is pleased to present, then the toy is Jason Scott of textfiles.com and one's other one for me. He has been working on a documentary about the BBS scene. Anyone here know what a BBS is? Anyone here still use a BBS? Alright, curiously, how, what was the, yeah, yes indeed. It's the most dysfunctional Nielsen family. Alright, Jason here is going to be talking about, amongst other things, his documentary that documents and chronicles the BBS scene. Anyone here participated in the making of that? Including yourself, Jason. Let's see that hand. There you go. Thank you, sir. Alright, without further ado, Defcon 12 presents Jason Scott. Hi everybody, I'm Jason Scott. How many people here were involved in it? It's all just a big cast party. Actually, to tell the truth, there are so many people interviewed that, yeah, I just keep bumping into people who are in it. I'm like, hi, how's the kids and everything? My name is Jason Scott. I run a site called textfiles.com. That's how most people know me because it's this site that has BBS-era text files. That site came into being in 1998 when I thought that I would look up whatever happened to my good old dial-up bulletin board system, Sherwood Forest 2, that was my personal favorite, and then to my great surprise, there was nothing about it. There was not a shrine, there was no information, there was nothing. And then I said, well, at least I'll find out about what happened with the New York BBSes, and there was nothing about that, and then, of course, BBSes, and there was very little about that. And I thought, uh-oh, doesn't anybody have the complete collection of Biaka agent 003's Guide to Telecommunications? And no, and what about the Barney Badass bitch files? These were important things. And nobody had it, and that's fine. I did. I had them in my basement, and so I went and grabbed these old five and a quarter inch floppies and put 9,000 text files up and unfathomably huge number that rates back to my days of youth. And that has grown, I don't know how many text files I have now. I think it's 60,000, but you kind of lose track. All of these are files from generally the bulletin board system era, an era when people had computers hooked up to foam lines that could answer them that were run by one or two people where other people could dial them up, leave messages, download files, and get in trouble with their parents. This concept, what ended up happening for me was that, you know, I decided I'd let the files speak for themselves. I put up these files and people would come and get them. Of course, anytime you put up two gigabytes of text, you end up with these unexpected side benefits. For instance, the number one reason why people come to textfiles.com by a factor of 20 is to download ASCII Middle Fingers. I'm the world's best source of ASCII Middle Fingers. What about Unicode Middle Fingers? Oh, I didn't have a good retort for that one. It was welling up inside me, but it was profane. ASCII Middle Fingers far and away and then come the bombs, but the sites constantly hit by Google, it's used by people to test search engines, people seem to be testing it to see how much of my bandwidth they can take and all of that. At some point, I started to get text files that weren't from BBS era, but the problem is how do you put soft docs for wizardry for the Apple II next to something about how to make the banner ads disappear from your mindspring account. So I created web.textfiles.com and said, anything after 1995, you go in this section. Suddenly, people started to send me other things because once people figure out you have a whole collection of old crap, they go, finally, someone can take my old crap away from me. And so they start sending me this. So I have been given these things often in the dead of night. CDs of old BBSes, that tapes of old BBSes, Apple II hard drives of old BBSes, and please do something with this. I have the machine that the Apple II port of Zork Zero was written on. I would call that a dubious honor. But they really had to do things to it to make it do it. So over time, people sent me things that were like text files. When I realized that it was the spirit that I was collecting, it really wasn't the files. It was this concept, this approach to how people lived online in the 80s. 80s are very important. Late 70s early 80s are important because that's one of the first times that people start to come online. And by people coming online, I don't mean purely technical folks. Right now, technical folks in a room, in a basement, somewhere some distance away from here are doing stuff that would make your colon let go. That's what they do. That's the benefit to being in that little room, and they create it. And then 100 years from now or 10 years from now, they're like, oh, we have holographic storage. And someone goes, like I did, back in whatever. You hear about people, they're now able to transfer the Bible and X number of seconds on this one internet. They're great. That's wonderful. But people couldn't use it. ARPANET existed, of course. Other network approaches existed in the early 70s. But people, you couldn't just go down to the store and buy connectivity. And it was only in the mid 70s when you started having the early adopters. And then suddenly, you can go down to the store. You can go down to Sears and buy yourself your G.I. Joe figure and buy your BBS hardware and software and your modem. And anybody could get on. Some people would say that is the great tragedy or the great wonder. Because people, it's just a person online. And that's something that happened throughout the 80s. This group of people, oh, you little weasel. These people didn't have often a computer background and just started living online. And they are the vanguards of what comes later with the internet. Been there, done that. Now there's more of it. And so on. And so suddenly there's this massive move to the internet. Well, when people describe history, they're usually trying to summarize it in a fashion that makes it easy to understand. So when I was interviewed by USA Today about textfiles.com, the person, Janet Colmbloom, who is an idiot, could not answer the simple basic questions about this and was trying to write an article on it. She actually called me back and said, what should the opening paragraph be? Finally, after working with her, like trying to make a sculpture using oven mitts, we were able to come up with something. And she called them single use websites that were geared towards computer users. As people who have used BBSs, you might find that a slightly disjointed approximation of your youth. At some point, I got this project idea in my head. You know, I have all these BBS numbers. Why don't I make, what would be involved if I just took all these numbers and correlated them and just made, here was every BBS there ever was. Just one big ass list. How big would that list be anyway? Who would be on it? What neat shit would happen? So I started to code it and I said, this is kind of fun and I wasn't going to do much with it. And within a very short time, I suddenly found that I had 45,000 numbers. And then I got slash dotted. Slash dotted has been good to me. It's okay. And I now have 103,000 numbers. And there are little stories. Even in the most, you know, all I have in it usually is name of the BBS, its phone number, what years it was there, who ran it, what software is on it. As an extra bonus, if somebody writes me and gives me comments, I add them in. Just in that little amount because you'll get, you know, the Wizard's Castle, the Freaker's Keep, and IDG Internet Services. And you, you know, you get the little story of this guy's life. Well, one of the things that I didn't expect with having 103,000 BBSs up listed was that it was a honeypot for people to reminisce. Somebody would type their name into a search engine. And there would come up their name next to the BBS they ran when they were 16, when it ran, where it ran from, listed in this pantheon of every BBS in that area code, names that they had not thought about for 10, 15 years, just presented as if it was some historical concept. And people would write to me. Somebody understands. I would then be given a book called Let Me Tell You About My BBS. I got many versions of this book. Sometimes it wasn't very well written. Sometimes it was very well written. Sometimes it was astoundingly well written. Sometimes it was very angry. And so I would collect them. And I thought these were great. And I thought, you know, yeah, they totally fucked up. They. See, because one of the things is that over time places like Time Life and PBS and Nova Storm and Blah and whatever to come along and they do the story, right? The Time Life Guide to BBSes. But thank you. Time Life Guide to Hacking. Thank you. You know, so on. The Time Life Guide to Napster. And, you know, okay, great. Historically. Great, wonderful. And you're done. And I went out and looked for it. And it wasn't there. And I realized it wasn't going to be there. And by the time it was going to be there, a lot of the people who did it would be dead or uninterested. They would go for the experts. They would try to focus on who died or had sex preferably at the same time. And they would avoid any of the little joys and the little wonders because those don't come out on screen in the same way as someone dying during sex or, you know, having sex after dying or whatever the hell they do. So, you know, you end up with this, you know, almost like a sketch outline. And I thought, you know, I'll bet you I could do better. I had a film degree 10 years ago that I never used. Why don't I do something about this? So then I started working on this concept and that became something called the BBS documentary. This gets an, I put up an announcement. I put up, I register BBSdocumentary.com. I start working on it. And then I get slash dotted. It's fun to get slash dotted once. And people started writing, wow, what a great idea. Everyone remembers? And I got more fucking books. You know, long, big things from people. Wow, it's wonderful. So for three months I researched, said, how am I going to do this? How would I tell this story? What's it going to be about? What's it going to be going on there? Now keep in mind, my first thought was not where am I going to get funding for this? My first thought wasn't like, oh boy, now I've got to go come up with this spec sheet so I can go run this around to Tech TV and run this over to PBS and maybe somebody will give me some money. Where's Ken Burns home? I can go sit outside. And my first thought was, how am I going to get this right? Not where am I going to spend the money. Because over the past 20 years, 30 years of human history, we've been spending quite a lot of time making it so that you can take the world around you, digitize it down, and present it back to you very quickly. It's kind of what we're into. We like that. It's cool. So I wasn't so worried about that. I wanted it to be pretty good. I wanted it to look pretty good. I wanted it to sound pretty good. And I wanted it to be, you know, I knew that there were people I was going to interview that nobody had ever interviewed. So, you know, I did my little part. So I began announcing that I was about to go into production. I had 500 people ask me to be, to interview them. And those were very interesting people. And I began, you know, I had all of my research up because one of the things that occurred to me was that you're going to have to provide your research. Because I'd rather find out that I did it wrong in an email than in the lobby of the theater. So I got a lot of mail. And, you know, and it's interesting on that level because people have very different history ideas. One of the most common things I encountered was that people would think that the way things happened was the way they experienced them, which sounds like an odd statement, but it really isn't. People would buy a modem. Modems were a good example. People would buy their 2400-baud modem. And when they bought it, that's when 2400-baud modems came out. Period. And of course, you know, there's this massive variance, 5, 10 years for different people who buy it at different times. They would say, oh, this happened here. The biggest, you know, the number one letter I tend to get that makes parts of me wrinkle is these letters where people say, you can't tell, you can't possibly, you have to use as many adverbs as you can, you can't possibly ever tell the story of the BBS unless you interview this man. You know, you'll never truly tell the story of the St. Louis BBS scene unless you interview these six people. And very quickly, I discovered how big a subject this was and that instead of just frazzing through it that I was actually going to try to take an effort, and so I had to start telling people, I'm not doing a movie, I'm doing a movie about skiing, not ski trails. I can. You've got to do the movie on your favorite ski trail. I can. Because, I mean, 103,000 BBSs. The best you can do, if you look at it, is try to get examples of things and use them as archetypes, the freaking BBS, the multi-line BBS, the BBS software company and so on, and try to show these different things. Get a lot of people on film, and as it turned out, I got 200 people on film. Production was supposed to be one year, editing one year, and then something involving a lawn chair and a drink. But it ended up being three years of filming. And I'm not working on the other projects as much as I want to because I'm doing this other major project. And one of the things I discovered very quickly was that doing a story on the BBS is like doing a documentary on the car. The people who want to watch stuff about Henry Ford are not going to care about rice boys renting Dodge Neons and fucking with them overnight. But they're both interesting stories. But how do you put those in the same one? Well, if you're like a lot of places, you do for eight seconds. You give each one eight seconds in equal time. So I knew at a very quick point that I was going to end up actually doing a mini series, a multi-series. This causes the number one complaint about my project, which is who the fuck would want to watch that? And that's one of those things, right? I can still remember being in the car telling people, how long is it going to be? I'm like, I don't know. Maybe nine hours. And it goes like, not to insult you, Jayz, but who the fuck is going to sit there? Because the problem was I kept calling it the BBS documentary and so people would think it was this one big Stroheim production of like nine straight hours. You know, the Bladderbuster 9000 was going to come, kill them. Now, as it's turned out, it's going to probably, well, okay, it looks like it's going to be something like five or six hours split off into episodes where different aspects of the BBS that simply don't mesh are being told. Like I said, I had 200 interviews which yielded 250 hours of footage. This already causes certain people who work in that industry to go, my God. And then from there, it's been an enormous amount of culling, moving things around. I am still in the editing process. However, I went for this talk because hell, hey, it's Defconn, Las Vegas, come on, Las Vegas. But beyond that, it also inspired me to like get a little move on because I was going through a lot of interviews and now I have something. So with your permission, I'm going to show you something I made for Defconn. This does not exist anywhere else. Hi, everyone in the hotel rooms. Start your camcorders. That quality is so great on that screen. The Defconn UHF channel. So what I'm showing you is about 14 or 15 minutes of footage. And already some of you are like, oh. Jesus Christ. Here's what's going on with that. This is, again, like I said, this is a set of footage. And what this is, is these are kind of example passages from each of six episodes. And so you can kind of see them. They don't stand on their own. And by that, I mean, it's not a little story. You'll see where I'm going. And I tell people, and it's important with projects like this, these projects of love, certain people will watch it and be like, how do you get out of here in a way that's not too embarrassing for me? You know, maybe I could pull the fire alarm. And you know, that's fine. That's fine. And you know, you have to say, well, who is this for? And people go, oh, is this going to be on PBS? And I'm like, hell no! You know, PBS will do horrible things to it. You know, you look at, I mean, Tech TV's coming to interview me. So I love you Tech TV, but Tech TV with Nerd Nation, for instance, it's a bunch of remixed documentaries that have been chewed around and it's not the way that they intended it. So I always intended this to be a DVD set. So this will probably be a 3D DVD set with a lot of extra footage and everything else. And I'll talk about what I'm going to do with the footage afterwards. But you know, about, you know, three DVDs of these different episodes based around different focused parts of BBSs. I did not put, I started to put names under everyone, but I realized that that was probably just being way too crazy right now with this thing because the faces go by so quickly. People who I interviewed who may or may not have been meaning to you, like I said, of the 200 people, and this is very important, when you do a documentary, you go interview the four experts, the freak job that best exemplifies the weirdest aspect of what you're doing, and you get some sort of narrator. And I didn't want to do that because BBSs weren't about figures. They were about people. You want to interview people who use them. So I went and I'd say about a half to three-quarters of my interviews are just people. They started a BBS in 1986, they ran it till 91, and it went down. And that was their fun. And they speak much more honestly about this than somebody whose professional job is to say, telecommunications are the forefront of the surfing of the blog, AMD tech thing, peer-to-peer. So I wanted people with names, quote-unquote, because it's just great to meet them. I got to meet Tom Jennings who wrote Phytonet, got to meet Wayne Bell who wrote World War IV, got to meet Vinton Surf, got to meet Ward Christensen who did X modem, Chuck Forsberg who did Z modem, who's Mark Herring who did Quick Packets. A concept. Okay, I'll forgive you that one. Anyone know what Quick Packets are? Quick Packets were this great idea. See how popular it was. So basically this guy Mark Herring wrote a module onto bulletin board systems that would take all of the messages and put them into a packet that represented those new messages. So when you dialed up with your client onto this thing, it would pull down a block of, here's all the new messages and then disconnect, and then it would provide them with an offline reader and writer and you could write all your replies, take all the time you wanted to, and then it would call and when it came up, bam, up came your 15 messages in full, you know, technicolor, you know, and even though everything went to crap, that would have revolutionized things. Mark Herring told me about... Whoo! The guy who... What do you call it? Did Quick Packets told me about sysops who were quadriplegics who could be on their board and run things and leave messages and not be tying up their own board for hours on end, typing with their mouth. And you'd never know. I dedicate some of these episodes to different people and there was this quadriplegic sysop. I just thought that would... Anyway, all that said. So a lot of names are going to go by, a lot of faces are going to go by without names and so on, and you get an idea for it. So there you go. It is, once again, it's a logo, six little excerpts with filler music, and then a trailer called 200 that I just put up on the website about two days ago. There's a trailer on the DEF CON disc called Where's. It's really weird. I just did it for fun, so, anyway. It was very important to me not to betray people. It was important not to say, you know, thanks for telling me your true and honest story, but it's about piracy! Because that sucks. So anyway, you do what you do. Damn you. We didn't just suddenly wake up one morning and we had the Xbox. We didn't wake up one morning and the Internet was there. You know? How did we get there? That's what you want to know about history for. January 16, 1978, I went out to go to work and it had been snowing most of the night, and I was unable to get out because it just kept snowing and kept snowing, and I lived on an alley which had to be shoveled. I didn't plow it for a long time. So I think I shoveled for like two hours and probably came in at like 9.30, 10 o'clock and realized I was not going to work that day. So I called Randy. I asked Ward, you know, could he write some software that could, that people talk to each other? And I said, you know, I've got the computer club recorder where people can call to find out when the next meeting is and delete questions and things like that, and why not take that line and put a system on it that people could upload newsletters and things like that. The whole BBS thing was for our computer club to be able to produce newsletters. That was the whole idea of it. It worked. From wherever it went from then, fine. I found Ward's system originally, CBBS Chicago, mentioned in an article like, if I recall, it was in Info World. And I went, that's cool. And I called it on it and went, that's really cool. Within two years, there was easily 200 to 300 phone numbers that you could call into the RCPMs, the RBBSs, the CPMNet guys. And, you know, we celebrated 100 calls. It took us almost three months to get 100 calls on the bulletin board because nobody had modems. So the only people with a calling bulletin board were the guys that were running bulletin boards. We said, we had our own computer. Wow. Everybody's job dropped. All of the stuff where we could get our hands on, we got, we transferred it over the phone lines and we looked at it and we learned from it. Yeah, well this actually was a custom cabinet and a frame build for me. I had all these boxes or floppy disks. Each of these boxes holds 70 disks. Somewhere around here or so, they change from 360Ks to 1.2 megs. And basically these disks here, which numbers from 1 to 1,800 are all shareware. This is all DOS. Very little Windows, almost all DOS shareware that I collected from BBSs. Now, the entire contents actually fits on two CDs. I put it on two CDs. Well, and that's a line that is not different here than it is everywhere. And that is, something has a purity about it that should not be sullied by even accepting money if people want to give it to you. Free market here. And I believe that marketplaces are the best way to tell what has value and what doesn't. Because I think it's a test as an engineer, it's just like putting a meter on something in my view. Because you can tell yourself what counts and pretty much make anything sound like it counts. But when other people tell you it counts, they can tell you a couple of ways. They can tell you with words, which are cheap, or they can write checks which say it really does count. And so I'm very much a believer that money doesn't sully anything. It ratifies it. I guess I vaguely talked with them as the fuzzy people. Now, I don't know why I came up with that term other than that they tend to have beards and they tend to divide right when you were talking to them. They moved a lot. And so I could never focus on them. So I called them the fuzzy people. They didn't know what they wanted. They didn't know how to get that. And they knew somebody else was going to get it first. Now, there was a period of time that you'd start to see advertisements on TV where they would actually mention at the bottom of their ad, their Baltimore system work, where you could contact them. That was impressive at the time. Actually, until you mentioned it, I didn't even remember that they were paid BBS. See, it all goes bad when he introduced money, introduced business. And I woke up and I was lying in bed and my eyes opened and I just... I saw the little light on the hard drive was flickering. It occurred to me. I'm like, it dawned on me. Somebody's using this now. This computer's not being wasted. I'm asleep, but someone's using it. That was the... I think it's like running something and seeing people using it and maintaining it and, you know, watching. You were the king or the queen or whatever of your own little kingdom. I used to watch people see exactly what they were doing. I could come home. If there was somebody on my board, I could turn on my monitor and see exactly what they were seeing and see what they were doing. At the end of the day, it's the sysop that is the ultimate judge, jury, and executioner. I would put the sysop screen up and start talking to somebody and if they were nice to me, I gave them special access and if they weren't nice to me, I would, goodbye, kick them off. Any time the system had gone down or something strange with a modem or something like that, I felt this great responsibility to take care of it. It's sort of like a child type thing. A lot of sysops got this protective feeling about their users, you know? Like they were my users. You were over here trying to steal my users, you know? Well, first thing is this is that there isn't no such thing as my users. They're fickle. They don't know where they get the most for their bang, for their buck or time or whatever, you know? I was never into the sysop, cosysop type crap, anyway. I mean, people were like, okay, I want to be a cosysop. I don't need any help. I mean, the system runs itself. And number two, where does a cosysop do? Never sysop was the co. When I was in bed and at night it was dark and the screen was turned off and I was just lying there trying to drive chirping away and making its little music, I could tell exactly where people were on the board based on the notes and the sounds that it was making. I could tell what door game they were going into, whether they were reading a message or posting a message, you know? If they were just logging in or if they had just logged out, I could follow their progress through the board just by the sounds that they made. Imagine you're limited to creating a picture with 16 colors and only the letters are on your keyboard. That's what you're given. You're giving this finite resource of 80 by 25 or 80 by 23 and you have this many rows of characters and this many lines. This art concept, this thing that they call antsy, how do people actually make these? They look impossible to build. It's just incredibly hard to explain to someone the entire concept of a community based around dialing up to another computer, downloading files, art associated with scenes, the entire concept of a scene. I mean, these things are so hard to verbalize, to vocalize, to paint this picture of an entire subculture that most people have no idea has ever existed. A lot of people have forgotten about art groups and about antsy art and it's a shame that some of the most incredible artists and artwork I've seen have been on computer, antsy, art, VGA rips. It was always this battle and it's tough to put in words, but there was this feeling of acid versus ice. Acid and ice. Ice questioned it. Dude, I got 40 to 50. Once you've discovered the internet and even when BBSs were still going strong you knew that it was the future. First, you dropped one phone line then you dropped the other. It just was becoming a hassle with three kids. Ran it until 1994 when I was a little boy and I was a little boy and I was a little boy and I was a little boy and I ran it until 1994 when we had the big Northridge earthquake and I think it was a 6.6 earthquake and of all the things that happened during that horrible earthquake my computer was up and running and the disc was spinning and that was not a good thing to have going on during an earthquake and it crashed. It came down to I was going to have to spend a fair amount of money at that time to replace the hard drive and there were just few enough calls that just said that's it. Sorry guys, I'm shutting it off. And that was a sad day in my book. I think the last time I went on a BBS it was actually a rant going you guys have to get on the internet. You know, it's weird. There doesn't seem to be a direct analog to the original BBS scene online today. There are some localized web boards and actually they are. It's quite a fact that they all suck. Usenet isn't really like BBSs. You know mailing lists aren't really like BBSs. None of those things kind of have the same feel. There's something about dialing up, you know, and getting the busy signal and waiting to get on man, I want to be, oh come on where do we get off? I want to get on line. I think that the percentage of idiots is the same now as it was back then, but if you have 20,000 people instead of 50 people on a board you're just going to have that many more idiots. I had just spoken part of this class at Cal Arts. Communications Arts or something like that. I had to explain what a bulletin board message base was. It's like well with this program you have on your computer you dial the number and you enter your name and password and then you can go to the messages and you can read these messages. And then you could add one. And if you waited long enough and I had to say months other people would have called in and left messages and after a few months you have a conversation. You know like why? You know they were all early 20s and I was like well that's stupid. I mean it is stupid. It was unbelievably stupid. Stealing software isn't as personal as it used to be. Getting the game as fast as we possibly could if that meant over knitting the game from you know data soft or broader bundle whatever we would do that and then when we'd get it we'd have it cracked by morning. You know that was our goal. And then we could post on our bulletin board that we had the game and that was if you could do that you were first to town you were the king of the hill. That was the whole deal. Serious competition developed between different groups. These groups would compete with each other and then with me as an individual in getting out you know these new ways and who can get it out first because ultimately whoever got it out first their version and their name by extension would be the one that dominated. The playing of the game it's a little secondary unless we're talking about something like chocolate which was such a wonderful game. He didn't care about the game so much anymore it was more about being first. Competition. Yeah. Classic hacking mentality. We call it what is. So that's why what is and what is what is. Waiters. I mean that was what it was all about. I can remember getting Ultimate 3 before it was actually in stores from one of the the local AE boards. And it's odd to talk about values when you're talking about pirating software and so on. But there was a code of ethics involved. Nowadays I think that code is slipped quite a bit but back in the good old days if you released a crack and it didn't work you got a reputation as somebody who was a slacker or whatever you made every effort to go back out and re-release it and make sure that people got fresh copies and so on. That's the big reason why Golden Boards existed was that people could find out what new games were and crack them down and hack them down and copy them faster than anybody else. That was the big game. It was a competition to get who could get there first. Whoever could crack it first you'd have your name up in lights. Twenty years later now we're getting it in lights but here's the lights. Well thank you for getting through that. So basically what you're seeing there like I said are six episodes I tried to split them up in the long general senses. There's actually a seventh one but I didn't want to kill you. No Phytonet because I've got all these people from Phytonet it just worked out that way. I got to be in the living room where Phytonet was created. In each of these cases as you can see I tried to go for the early days of BBSs but that's pretty simple. Out quote unquote sorry. When you see the HPVAC that's the one that they would normally only be the one they're putting up. That's the one they want. But I wanted that particular episode I don't know if it's quite obvious from that footage but you'll notice that it really wasn't about coming out to kill people in their homes which is like the underlying aspect of most hacker documentaries professionally is these people are going to come and kill you, come meet your enemy. And this particular one is like boy we sure had a whole fun time and we had our little code and what we wanted to do and it was really important to us to win against the other guy. Those are members of the Midwest Pirates Guild that's the freeze let's see there was a number of other figures who I keep forgetting the really spastic guy with the two pinball machines is named Jeff Keegan and was one of my best interviews. He he basically channeled the 80s in front of me it was amazing I'm feeling it I can't get online ah so that was really wonderful BBS's are not dead that's kind of the important thing to point out I interviewed people I interviewed a group of Texas area sysops who still meet once every month who still run all BBS's and still do their thing BBS's are big in other countries BBS's are huge in Russia and so on so it's not like that but on the other hand it's not like it was now here because of the internet so in splitting it apart I think I'm going to tell a better story and I'm hoping at the end of it that I've done these people right ah with this talk I've actually cut through I don't know if I really have time for questions so let me say what one of the plans that I always intended to do let me cover two things first of all people are like well you're producing DVDs are you concerned about pirates and as I was explaining to the duplication place I said you know of course you understand that Deviance is going to have a release of this while it's in the plane coming to my house yeah yeah yeah so you can spend your life you know there's a certain spectrum of people who use media correct I mean you have people who would never think of you know everything was for sale never would think of taking it or quote oh well not taking it you know I mean copying it and then you have people for whom if they do not get it free it is a personal insult and what you'll notice is that companies and people who create content don't know where to draw the line if they you know there are these guys over here I don't care what you stick in the package or what you do they're going to take it and if you treat everyone like they're those people everyone's miserable why are you doing that my goal is to come up with reasons why people would want to buy it and you know I may have it that people can send me messages that will be included on the DVDs you know things like that you know take a creative aspect to it do the best you can but realize yeah of course people are going to copy it and oh no more people are going to learn about BBS's they sure screwed me so you know that's going to be that's going to be fine the other thing is what about all the extra footage because one of the things that really pisses me off whenever I see a documentary they'll have an interesting guy and I'm like I just want to hear that guy talk for an hour so I've already made arrangements with archive.org that basically full interviews are just going to go on there a year or something after release where it's like wow word christiansen what does he have to say for five hours which was how long our interview lasted well you're going to get it I am word christiansen only video interview the man who made X modem only appears on footage I shot I thought that's wrong same with the guy who created Z modem a lot of other people I wanted these stories so that in another couple of 20 years when they go wow you know BBS's actually did turn out to be important they can go back and they can just pull up this footage and go oh there it is wonderful you want to trade for it so you know I guess what I'm saying is I'm trying to do this right doing it right has been a lot of energy doing it wrong doesn't take much energy I could have shot it in a month but I wanted to do it right can you write me a good wrap up sentence I'm kidding basically what I'm saying is the amount of effort it took on my part to go from there to here was merely wanting to do it and sticking to it and there are a lot of people out there who I hear talk about projects and I have to do it but I just got to get this or I need my server to be right or I haven't gotten the HTML I haven't gotten the cascading style sheet to look as good as I'd like it to so I can't start my programming project and I'm just like just start it just start it it'll all work out in the end there's been a lot of people who have helped me along the way there have been a lot of people who gave me things it probably isn't much of a secret and I certainly won't make it a secret there was one person I interviewed who said wow this seems really important here's $10,000 because he saw what I was doing and what I was going about and he gets a free copy you gotta do comps take two but it became by being honest to people I always told people what I was doing what I'm doing this about and I always made sure that when I showed somebody that it was honest that you weren't seeing Trekkies yes sir where can we get it when it's available if you go to bbsdocumentary.com there is a notification list you can sign up for there's trailers you can look at photos of the interviews which I did and you can sign up for it and it's not a commitments thing of course just go up there and say how many you want and then my people will come for you anyway so I hope that my bulletin board system is the worst one ever made and that the really good ones will be the ones that go he did it wrong we can do better and they'll start making them that's really important to me because this is my bag bulletin board systems and I'm saying make your own worst documentary too if nobody else is the rewards are quite amazing okay yes I'm going to distribute it myself I trust nobody well you know I mean in the old days there were like three networks and they all hated you and they wanted your stuff for free sometimes they would pay you to make stuff that they would then take from you for free I don't have a lot of I mean I went to film school right and then I started to learn about how they make films and what's involved in films and I was like woo computers and you know I'm not I'm not gonna fill up a huge rant but you know the days for the moment the days of where you had to get a person to do it are kind of over I mean I shot it on video I shot it $3 an hour on this Canon XL1 this one piece of equipment and you know got it as a floor model from B&H Photo picked up a couple of microphones and shot it myself I have a I have a 1.5 gigahertz machine running Vegas video with 4.5 terabytes of USB 2 storage and that's how I've been doing it and when I'm done if you have something I can hold it for you all set all set it's loud in there but you know there you go people are like what about Wade on an apple why didn't you do it I'm just like I just did it if I did it a way that isn't as professional it still got made so I guess that's really about it someone's giving me the finger two fingers do away finger two fingers again I guess when will it come out oh you scare me I will not let 2004 pass without it so there you go yes sir one more in America yeah yeah primarily white I tried to play the game of like well I need to get it worked out to white males from suburban neighborhoods a few women who wanted to think they were the only women this is what I objectively I got to tell you and a few black guys and a few Asian guys and a few other you can't can't make butter out of air man I shot the footage that was there and but one thing that did come out of it all was that at the end of the day for everyone I interviewed it wasn't about the code it wasn't about the hardware it was about the people that they met when they were there it was the people the friendships they made the loves they had and they lost and that's the glue that stuck around years later no no however BBS babies came behind the camera on two occasions are you interviewing about and they said what's that that was kind of anyway I interviewed one kid who had never been on a BBS that wasn't as productive as I hoped a man is coming to kill me alright thank you very much and thank you for your patience I forgot one other thing I am now going over to the electronic frontier foundation Dunk Tank so if after enjoying my film you wish to make me wet just come on over to the electronic frontier foundation Dunk Tank not so fast folks I need everyone out that door