textfiles.com

» go to textfiles.com now (it still works)

~ what it is ~

jason scott started collecting the old internet in 1998, right while everyone else was busy building the new one. textfiles.com is an archive of text files from the bulletin board era, roughly the 1980s through the mid 1990s. hacking guides, phreaking boxes, anarchist cookbook clones, game walkthroughs, and a lot of teenagers explaining the universe in 80 columns of ascii. by 2005 the collection had passed 58,000 files, and it kept growing after that.

my own timing was off for this era. i got online in 1998, dial-up in turkey, straight onto the web. the BBS world was already emptying out by then, so i never called a board myself. textfiles.com is how i actually read that period, years later, one file at a time. it is the closest thing there is to visiting.

~ what is actually in there ~

the main site is only part of it. artscene.textfiles.com holds the ansi and ascii art scene. audio.textfiles.com has recorded prank calls. cd.textfiles.com mirrors the shareware cd-roms of the 90s, whole discs of them. bbslist.textfiles.com is a database of boards that once existed, phone numbers and all, which is now a phone book for a country that is gone.

scott calls the approach completionist. not the best files, all the files. the bad poetry sits next to the legendary hacking zines because in 1993 they sat next to each other on the same board. that refusal to curate is what makes it a real archive instead of a greatest-hits page.

~ the man behind it ~

jason scott turned out to be one of the most important people in internet preservation. he made BBS: The Documentary in 2005, then GET LAMP about text adventures. he founded archive team, the volunteer group that grabs copies of dying sites before they vanish. when geocities was shut down in 2009, archive team was the group that saved what could be saved. he works at the internet archive now. a lot of the dead sites buried on rip.so have a copy somewhere because of him and the people around him.

which gives textfiles.com a strange position here. it is a living site whose entire subject is dead sites. the graveyard's librarian, basically.

~ what almost killed it ~

honestly, nothing has come close. plain text is the cheapest thing on the internet to host. there is no database to crack, no framework to rot, no business model to collapse because there is no business. the design has not changed since 1998 and does not need to. as of 2017 the site was still pulling around 400,000 unique visitors a month, which is more than most startups ever see, for a pile of files older than their founders.

the real risk is the obvious one, it is one person's project. but the collection is mirrored, and the internet archive exists partly because the same man kept insisting this material mattered. of all the sites in the alive wing, this one is probably the hardest to actually kill.

~ why it still matters ~

the BBS world left almost no trace on the web. google cannot crawl a phone number from 1989. without textfiles.com, the first fifteen years of online culture would exist mostly as secondhand memory, and secondhand memory is how history gets rewritten.

instead the primary sources are just there, free, in the original formatting, typos preserved. you can read what a 15 year old phreaker thought about the phone company in 1987, exactly as he typed it. no other part of early computing got this lucky. it got a librarian before it got a funeral.

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