textfiles.com

textfiles.com is a website dedicated to preserving the digital documents that contain the history of the bulletin board system (BBS) world and various subcultures,[1] and thus providing "a glimpse into the history of writers and artists bound by the 128 characters that the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) allowed them".[2] The site categorizes and stores thousands of text files, primarily from the 1980s, but also contains some older files and some that were created well into the 1990s. A broad range of topics is presented, including anarchy, art, carding, computers, drugs, ezines, freemasonry, computer games, hacking, phreaking, politics, computer piracy, sex, and UFOs.[3] The site was created and is run by Jason Scott.

The front page of textfiles.com in 2004

The site went online in 1998,[4] and as of 2005 had collected 58,227 files.[5] As of 2017 the site was averaging 350,000–450,000 unique visitors per month.[6] Most of the textfiles.com projects are "completionist" in outlook, attempting to gather as much information as possible within the decided scope.

The site also houses a number of sub-projects with their own hostnames. artscene.textfiles.com has a repository of computer art including crack intros, ANSI and ASCII art and other related documents; audio.textfiles.com has an archive of audio files, including prank calls, recorded telephone conferences with BBS owners and hacker radio shows; cd.textfiles.com contains an archive of 1990s shareware discs; web.textfiles.com contains files created after the World Wide Web went into mainstream use, approximately 1995; bbslist.textfiles.com aims to be a comprehensive list of all historical BBSes; timeline.textfiles.com is meant to list all important events in the history of BBSes.

See also

References
  1. Haynes, Gavin (5 February 2017). "Net nostalgia: the online museums preserving dolphin gifs and spinning Comic Sans". The Guardian. Retrieved 6 March 2018.
  2. Scott, Jason. "T E X T F I L E S D O T C O M". textfiles.com. Retrieved 6 March 2018.
  3. Nickell, Joe Ashbrook (1 March 1999). "Return of the Living BBS". Wired. Retrieved 6 March 2018.
  4. Scott, Jason (18 June 2013). Open Source Bridge 2012 Keynote - Jason Scott (YouTube video). Open Source Bridge. Event occurs at 6m36s. Archived from the original on 2021-12-21. Retrieved 6 March 2018.
  5. Scott, Jason. "TEXTFILES.COM File Statistics". textfiles.com. Retrieved 16 August 2010.
  6. Scott, Jason [@textfiles] (19 Nov 2017). "I hadn't run webalizer against http://textfiles.com for, it looks like, 3-4 years. Finally did it - the site averages 350,000-400,000 unique users a month. Most want sex files and a PDF on the IBM Selectric Typewriter" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
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