TEXTFILES.COM was founded in 1998 to save what felt like a rapidly
disappearing part of computer history: the thousands of textfiles that
had been shared and written for Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes).
While the primary point of many BBSes were to foster conversarions on
message boards or provide binary programs to computer users, in fact
they quickly found themselves to be tiny libraries of wisdom, humor,
sin, and insanity, all provided by information files that were being
written to fill gaps in knowledge (or just for the fun of it).
Unfortunately, many BBSes were single-line affairs, allowing one user
at a time to use them, and limiting themselves to a small community.
In many cases they never experienced networking, so the files and the
writings of that BBS went away with it. In some cases, users saved the
data and squirreled them away on floppy disks, but they often did not.
This is the tragedy of the BBS, that it was enjoyed by so few, but it
is also the triumph, as those few felt themselves part of a family,
even if a dysfunctional one.
The TEXTFILES.COM site was created because of the inability to find many
of the "old classic" text files from BBSes on the Internet. At the time,
it felt like that whole aspect of computer history would be forgotten,
or made into a slick summarization of those amazing times passing for
the truth. Starting with a dusty collection of floppy disks stored in a
shoebox, the site began to take shape.
From those humble beginnings in 1998, the site has grown to the scale
of tens of thousands of textfiles spanning over thirty years. Many
people, inspired by the collection, have uploaded their own set of
memories and files, while other sites have been brought in and added
to the pile. Now, it feels, many of the original "classics" have been
saved, put up for the world to download, invincible against time.
But we can't let the same mistake happen again.
While every effort is made to preserve the TEXTFILES.COM site, and a
lot of safeguards are in place, many of them still depend on one guy,
me, to make sure it's all still around and easy to find. This is a
bad situation. The world is an unsure place, and yet the Internet has
been designed from the ground up to be resilient, fast, and somewhat
easy to use. The key is to use it for the saving of this site.
Here, then, is a complete snapshot of TEXTFILES.COM and a number of
related sites, presented as one big archive. Here in the dawn of the
21st century, multi-hundred megabytes are no longer the gargantuan
monuments they once were; MP3s saw to that, encouraging people to
download a single song that took up more space than many BBSes took
up in total in the 1980's and 1970's. In this new breathtaking era,
the TEXTFILES.COM archive is just another quaint addition to your hard
drive.
Take this file, split it apart, remix it, do what you want; throw it
onto a CD and leave it on a train, or use the millions of words to
test your new software. Or maybe, if you have time, sit down and read
the words of a different time, with people whose dreams and goals were
much like your own and who wanted to share them with others, one
download at a time.
