Skip to main content

BBS: The Documentary

Eight hours on the networks that existed before the internet reached homes, released free by the person who made it.

Opens in a new tab. We do not control this site and it may have changed since we catalogued it.

How to get the most from it

BBS: The Documentary sits in Old Net Art under Retro, filed as rabbit hole.

  • Open it when the evening is free. It has no natural stopping point.
  • It works on a phone or a desktop, so open it on whatever is nearest.
  • Turn the sound up or put headphones on — it needs audio.
  • No account needed — you can start without signing up.
  • Go in expecting something nostalgic and brainy.

About this category: Personal pages, hand-written HTML, Winamp skins and net art from an era when nobody had decided what a website was supposed to look like.

Good for

  • A long evening with nothing planned
  • A trip back to the older internet
  • Giving your brain a workout
  • Killing time on your phone
  • Trying it with zero commitment

BBS: The Documentary: quick answers

Is BBS: The Documentary free?

Yes. BBS: The Documentary is free to use and needs no account.

Do I need an account to use BBS: The Documentary?

No. You can use BBS: The Documentary without signing up for anything.

Does BBS: The Documentary work on a phone?

Yes. BBS: The Documentary works on phones as well as desktop browsers.

Is BBS: The Documentary safe for work?

Yes, we file it as safe for work. It does need sound, so bring headphones.

How long does BBS: The Documentary take?

We file it as "Rabbit hole": Clear your evening. We warned you.

More in Old Net Art

All 12 in Old Net Art
  • A 1996 US presidential campaign website, still up, still exactly as it was. An accidental museum of early political web design.

  • A browsable restoration of the GeoCities neighbourhoods, so you can wander into Area51 or SunsetStrip the way people once did.

  • An exhaustive archive of worlds built in a 1991 ASCII game creator, catalogued with more care than most national collections.

  • Rhizome's restored survey of a hundred works of net art, each with the context needed to understand why it mattered.

Same mood: nostalgic

All nostalgic sites
  • Chiptune tracker with a whole song's worth of channels, shareable as a URL that contains the entire tune inside it.

    • 10 min
    • Sound on
    • Desktop
  • A company worth hundreds of billions serves a homepage of plain blue links, unchanged since the 1990s and quietly proud of it.

  • Community for adding glitter, sparkles and animated hearts to photographs, still busily active long after the trend died.

  • Monkeys pop balloons along a fixed path, and the upgrade trees behind that sentence are deep enough to justify the reputation.

    • 10 min
    • Desktop

Keep exploring

Have a site of your own? Suggest it for Detour or browse the AltFTool backlinks hub.