FilePile.com

» see filepile.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

FilePile closed about a year after I first got a modem working at home, and I never once landed on it. American BBS culture is the part of this story that stayed American. A bulletin board was a phone number, and a phone number meant a local call, so a board in Milwaukee was a Milwaukee thing no matter how many files it held. What reached Turkey in 1998 was the web, already fully formed and already free of the area code.

FilePile went up in 1996 as the browser-facing half of that world. Behind it sat Exec-PC, an online service in Wisconsin whose file collection was, by its own claim and by most contemporary accounts, the largest indexed shareware archive anywhere: over 1.2 million files covering utilities and drivers and everything people uploaded in between. The site put a search box and a folder tree in front of it, which in 1996 was still a novel thing to do with a file archive.

The seam showed in one detail. You could browse FilePile, search it and pull files down through the web, but you could not put anything into it that way. Uploads still went through the BBS terminal interface, the way they had since 1983. The archive had grown a web front end without becoming a web service, and for three years that was good enough.

~ the case file ~

~ the bbs underneath ~

Bob Mahoney started Exec-PC in 1983 and it grew into one of the largest bulletin board systems in the world, running against CompuServe and Prodigy with a very different shape. At its mid-90s peak it answered on more than 250 lines and held over 300 gigabytes of files, which was an absurd number for a private operation in that decade. Paying subscribers also got mail, message forums and door games, but the shareware library was the reason anyone dialed.

That business model had a hard ceiling built into it. Every simultaneous user needed a modem and a phone line at the far end, and Exec-PC bought both by the hundred. The web needed neither. FilePile was the attempt to move the valuable part, the collection, onto infrastructure that did not scale by buying more telephone hardware.

~ 30 august 1999 ~

The farewell page is still in the Internet Archive and it is short. "As of August 30th, 1999 FilePile (formerly The World File Project) has ceased operations. It has been our pleasure for the past three years to provide this as a service to the internet community and to carry on the ExecPC BBS into the internet era." It thanks the userbase across fifteen years of BBS and web combined, thanks PKWare for sponsoring the thing, and thanks Bob Mahoney by name.

It is signed by two people: James McCarthy, webmaster, and Michael Mittelstadt, system admin. Nobody explained why in public. The mirrored encyclopedia entry says it was made obsolete by other internet services, which is the polite version of what happened to every curated file archive that had to keep a phone bank alive behind it. The BBS itself stayed reachable over telnet afterward, which is its own kind of afterlife.

~ what the web did instead ~

The category did not die with FilePile, it just stopped needing a basement in Wisconsin. Download.com and Tucows had already rebuilt the same idea with no dial-up ancestry to carry, and the shareware model itself was on its way out as the browser became the place software got used rather than downloaded. Today filepile.com is a domain listed for sale, which is the most common ending in this whole graveyard.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »