Clunky and slow, the bulletin board system ultimately proved irresistible. Jason Scott's new three-DVD set, BBS: The Documentary, tracks the birth of an online subculture. By Kim Zetter.

Remember when there was no e-mail or instant messaging? Reaching out to touch someone digitally once meant you had to dial into a phone line through your Trash-80 PC, type a message, post it to an online bulletin board and then wait weeks -- or more often months -- to get a response.

Before America Online, Friendster, forums and blogs, geeks communicated with one another in a clunky and pedestrian way that was the precursor to all subsequent forms of online communication.

It was called a bulletin board system, or BBS, and was essentially a virtual living room where people hooked up remotely to chat, exchange freeware or play computer games, albeit at a really slow speed.

Anyone nostalgic for those halcyon days can now thank digital archivist and filmmaker Jason Scott for BBS: The Documentary, a five-and-a-half-hour paean to the era when computers were named Stacy and Lisa, and tech loyalists fought bitter battles over the superiority of Ataris to Amigas.

Filled with interviews of the founders of the first bulletin board, the creator of Fido software, internet patriarch Vint Cerf and many others, the surprisingly engrossing documentary grew out of a project Scott began in 1998 when he started collecting text files posted to BBSes over the years and published them at textfiles.com. He just wanted to preserve a bit of tech history that meant a lot to his teen years, but he was soon inundated with BBS artifacts that other people sent in.

BBSes were the blogs of their day and began sprouting up in the late '70s, after the appearance of the Hayes modem, with names like Aladdin's Lamp, The Puzzle Palace and Leprechaun Heaven, each one devoted to a different topic. Users and system operators, or sysops, compiled directories of BBS names, phone numbers and their topics. Scott culled the names he could find and composed a list that has now grown to 105,000.

When he posted the list online, it gave old BBS users a blast from their past.

"They would type in their name on Google and here would come up the name of a BBS that they had run 20 years ago when they were 13," Scott said. "I had a guy tell me that he was dating a girl and she asked him, 'What was the Wizard Castle?' It was the name of a BBS he had run for only a few months in 1983."

People began sending Scott personal essays reminiscing about their life on the boards. So Scott, who studied film in school, decided to make a documentary. The four-year project, begun in 2001, was just released as a three-DVD set containing eight episodes and bonus material. Fans can see various aspects of the BBS story, such as the birth of boards, the creation of FidoNet, the appearance of online porn and the digital art medium called ANSI art.

The first BBS was launched in 1978 by Ward Christensen, an IBM mainframe programmer who developed Xmodem, and Randy Suess. It was born during a snowstorm.

When a blizzard struck Chicago where Christensen lived, he couldn't go to work one day, and he decided to fiddle with an idea he and Suess had discussed for their computer club, the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyist Exchange, or CACHE. The plan was to replace the group's answering machine that announced meetings with a computerized message board allowing people to leave messages on the board using their computer. It took Christensen two weeks to write the software while Suess assembled the hardware.

The board launched Feb. 16, 1978, as CBBS, for the Computerized Bulletin Board System, using a 300-baud modem. Only one caller could connect to the board at a time (eventually someone developed software to allow multiple phone lines to connect to a board at once), and the system could transfer only about five words per second. But it was a hit.

Months later, Christensen and Suess published an article about the board in Byte magazine and distributed free copies of the BBS software. BBSes began popping up everywhere, but callers to them were scarce since few people owned modems yet.

Within two years, 200 to 300 BBSes flourished, and eventually more than 150,000 existed in North America at the peak of their popularity.

Unlike the nascent internet, whose use was confined at the time to researchers and the military, BBSes were populist to their core, available to anyone who could afford the hefty $3,000 to $10,000 price tag for a computer. All it took to establish a BBS and become your own sysop was to install the software on a home PC with a modem and connect it to a phone line that remote users could dial into and leave messages.

On the surface, the BBS was, perhaps, a ridiculous idea. Conversations took an eon to unfold. And a game of digital chess or Battleship played on the boards would take days to progress because a player had to wait a day or two after making a move for an opponent to dial in and take a turn.

Tom Jennings, creator of the Fido protocol that allowed hundreds of BBSes to network with each other, recalls describing the concept to friends and getting blank stares.

"With this program you'd have on your computer you'd dial a number, you'd enter your name and password ... and then you could go to the messages so you could read the messages. And then you could add one," Jennings told friends. "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 would have a conversation.

"And they're like, why?... It was unbelievably stupid."