Intergalactic FM transmits the good stuff, ranging from electro, hiphop and house to soundtracks and ambient drones. Pretty far out and eclectic, and with a nifty website to boot. There’s three stations to choose from so hop on the intergalactic frequency and ride those sonic waves, baby.
FirstSounds.ORG offers (what probably is) the first recording ever of a human voice (in this case singing a line from a french folk song). This is recorded seventeen years before Edison did his thing for the first time.
We released this sound in March 2008, and it has become the icon of humanity’s first recording of its own voice. In September we undertook a second restoration using more advanced technologies.
The website’s goal is to create a comprehensive database of old recorded sound and other related and historically significant material.
“Beware the beast Man, for he is the Devil’s pawn. Alone among God’s primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother’s land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death.”
My first contact with the electronic world would be back in the early 90s when I was driving my parents nuts with towering phone bills and hours spent behind the computer browsing various BBS’s and later logging on the Internet. BBS’s (Bulletin Board System) are an ancient way of sharing software, textfiles, pictures, etc. I used to log on to them using a 2400 baud modem, which was pretty far out back then and it was fun seeing the technology improve up to the point where I’m posting my own bullshit on my own website with pretty much unlimited bandwidth. No more waiting around for that hot p0rn picture to show on my screen.
Now, since this is an ancient technology, people are bound to forget about it. It’s hardly used anymore and the Internet ate everything so someone (actually the owner of textfiles.com) came up with the idea of directing a documentary about the wildly entertaining world of Bulletin Board Systems. The end product is roughly 5,5 hours long and they released it on DVD. Here’s a bl0rb from the website mentioned above:
In the Summer of 2001, Jason Scott, a computer historian (and proprietor of the textfiles.com history site) wondered if anyone had made a film about these BBSes. They hadn’t, so he decided he would.
Four years, thousands of miles of travelling, and over 200 interviews later, “BBS: The Documentary”, a mini-series of 8 episodes about the history of the BBS, is now available. Spanning 3 DVDs and totalling five and a half hours, this documentary is actually eight documentaries about different aspects of this important story in the annals of computer history.
* Baud introduces the story of the beginning of the BBS, including interviews with Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, who used a snowstorm as an inspiration to change the world.
* Sysops and Users introduces the stories of the people who used BBSes, and lets them tell their own stories of living in this new world.
* Make it Pay covers the BBS industry that rose in the 1980’s and grew to fantastic heights before disappearing almost overnight.
* Fidonet covers the largest volunteer-run computer network in history, and the people who made it a joy and a political nightmare.
* Artscene tells the rarely-heard history of the ANSI Art Scene that thrived in the BBS world, where art was currency and battles waged over nothing more than pure talent.
* HPAC (Hacking Phreaking Anarchy Cracking) hears from some of the users of “underground” BBSes and their unique view of the world of information and computers.
* Compression tells the story of the PKWARE/SEA legal battle of the late 1980s and how a fight that broke out over something as simple as data compression resulted in waylaid lives and lost opportunity.
* No Carrier wishes a fond farewell to the dial-up BBS and its integration into the Internet.
But that’s not all, folks. The same dude came up with the idea to do a documentary on text-based adventure games. Yep. That is probably even MORE ancient; you can find info about it here. Jason Scott is still digging up the fossils so the work is still in progress but it promises to be something interesting, especially for all those geeks out there who used to spend hours during the night typing shit like: “get key” or “go east”.
