BBS: The Documentary
Jason Scott's 2005 documentary series about bulletin board systems, told by the people who ran them.
Scott shot around 200 interviews in the early 2000s and cut them into eight episodes covering the rise and fall of the BBS era: the first systems in the late 1970s, sysops' home-built server closets, FidoNet, ANSI art, warez and phone phreaks, and finally how the internet made the whole thing redundant within a few years.
The series was released under a Creative Commons licence, which made it easy to share and archive — fitting for a work about a culture built on copying files between machines. It remains the most thorough primary source on what online communities looked like before the web, and many of those interviewed are no longer around to ask.