The prehistory of cyberspace: how BBSes paved the way for the Web.

• Author: Sanchez, Julian
• Position: BBS: The Documentary - Video Recording Review

In the antediluvian '80s, when mass participation in the Internet was still but a gleam in Al Gore's eye, an enthusiastic network of avant-garde geeks was exploring an embryonic cyberspace. By the hundreds of thousands, they created in miniature the precursors of the vast communication system that today envelops our social and professional lives.

They were called bulletin board systems, or BBSes: communities that allowed users to dial in at crawling modem speeds--usually only one at a time--and exchange private e-mails, public messages, and software files. The first of the boards appeared in 1979, when a snowstorm provoked hobbyists Ward Christensen and Randy Suess to hack together something they called EBBS, the Computerized Bulletin Board System, for their Chicago-area computer users group. By the mid-'90s, the BBS scene was all but defunct: The Internet had siphoned off its early-adopter members like a newborn insect devouring its mother.

The all-but-lost story of those early years is exhumed in Jason Scott's BBS: The Documentary, an eight-part, five-and-a-half-hour, three-DVD history cobbled together from some 200 interviews with the people who ran, used, and covered the world of the boards. Rarely present in BBS himself, Scott stitches together scraps of his subjects' recollections into eight topical narrative collages focusing on different aspects of BBS culture, from the quixotic struggle to make a buck off the boards to the fierce rivalries between the BBS art groups, teams of graphically gifted kids who competed to produce the most dazzling images working from a palate of clunky colored blocks.

Among the more interesting tales is that of FidoNet and its frenetic architect, Tom Jennings. In 1984, when only a handful of academic computer scientists were aware of (let alone using) the Internet, Jennings created software that allowed BBS users to send e-mail and discussion board messages across the country and, later, around the world. By modern standards, it was slow. At the time, it seemed pretty rapid. Member boards--numbering more than 35,000 at the network's peak--would dial in periodically to a regional hub, which would then relay messages to other hubs and, finally, to their destinations.

"It really was written on explicitly anarchist principles," explains Jennings, who would later found the queer/anarchist/punk zine Homocore. "We work better without top-down control; we work better cooperatively." Many assume that, because the...