Now that the founders of The Pirate Bay have been thrown in a deep and dark dungeon, maybe you should watch a documentary about the current state of copyright and culture, which is free for download at… The Pirate Bay, but I suggest you start here.

Stream the full feature in high quality.

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”.