textfiles.com is a

website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Wikip ...

dedicated to preserving the digital documents that contain the history of the

bulletin board system A bulletin board system (BBS), also called computer bulletin board service (CBBS), is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such ...

(BBS) world and various subcultures, 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 ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

) allowed them". The site categorizes and stores thousands of

text file A text file (sometimes spelled textfile; an old alternative name is flatfile) is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines of electronic text. A text file exists stored as data within a computer file system. In operat ...

s, 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 Anarchy is a society without a government. It may also refer to a society or group of people that entirely rejects a set hierarchy. ''Anarchy'' was first used in English in 1539, meaning "an absence of government". Pierre-Joseph Proudhon adopte ...

art Art is a diverse range of human activity, and resulting product, that involves creative or imaginative talent expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas. There is no generally agreed definition of wha ...

carding Carding is a mechanical process that disentangles, cleans and intermixes fibres to produce a continuous web or sliver suitable for subsequent processing. This is achieved by passing the fibres between differentially moving surfaces covered wit ...

, computers,

drugs A drug is any chemical substance that causes a change in an organism's physiology or psychology when consumed. Drugs are typically distinguished from food and substances that provide nutritional support. Consumption of drugs can be via inhalat ...

ezine An online magazine is a magazine published on the Internet, through bulletin board systems and other forms of public computer networks. One of the first magazines to convert from a print magazine format to being online only was the computer maga ...

freemasonry Freemasonry or Masonry refers to fraternal organisations that trace their origins to the local guilds of stonemasons that, from the end of the 13th century, regulated the qualifications of stonemasons and their interaction with authorities ...

computer game Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, controller, keyboard, or motion sensing device to generate visual feedback. This feedbac ...

s, hacking,

phreaking Phreaking is a slang term coined to describe the activity of a culture of people who study, experiment with, or explore telecommunication systems, such as equipment and systems connected to public telephone networks. The term ''phreak'' is a ...

politics Politics (from , ) is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that stud ...

, computer piracy,

sex Sex is the trait that determines whether a sexually reproducing animal or plant produces male or female gametes. Male plants and animals produce smaller mobile gametes (spermatozoa, sperm, pollen), while females produce larger ones ( ova, of ...

, and

UFOs An unidentified flying object (UFO), more recently renamed by US officials as a UAP (unidentified aerial phenomenon), is any perceived aerial phenomenon that cannot be immediately identified or explained. On investigation, most UFOs are ide ...

. The site was created and is run by

Jason Scott Jason Scott Sadofsky (born September 13, 1970), more commonly known as Jason Scott, is an American archivist, historian of technology, filmmaker, performer, and actor. Scott has been known by the online pseudonyms Sketch, SketchCow, The Slipped ...

. The site went online in 1998, and had collected 58,227 files. the site was averaging 350,000–450,000 unique visitors per month. 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

hostname In computer networking, a hostname (archaically nodename) is a label that is assigned to a device connected to a computer network and that is used to identify the device in various forms of electronic communication, such as the World Wide Web. Hos ...

s. ''artscene.textfiles.com'' has a repository of computer art including

crack intro __NOTOC__ A crack intro, also known as a cracktro, loader, or just intro, is a small introduction sequence added to cracked software. It aims to inform the user which "cracking crew" or individual cracker removed the software's copy protection and ...

ANSI The American National Standards Institute (ANSI ) is a private non-profit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. The organ ...

and

ASCII art ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) character (computing), characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 an ...

and other related documents; ''audio.textfiles.com'' has an archive of

audio file An audio file format is a file format for storing digital audio data on a computer system. The bit layout of the audio data (excluding metadata) is called the audio coding format and can be uncompressed, or compressed to reduce the file size, o ...

s, including

prank call A prank call (also known as a crank call) is a telephone call intended by the caller as a practical joke played on the person answering. It is often a type of nuisance call. It can be illegal under certain circumstances. Recordings of prank ph ...

s, recorded telephone conferences with BBS owners and hacker radio shows; ''cd.textfiles.com'' contains an archive of 1990s

shareware Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer ...

discs; ''web.textfiles.com'' contains files created after the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...

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.

References

External links

*
Archive of ''Short Talk Bulletin''
{{BBS Bulletin board systems Internet properties established in 1998 American digital libraries Discipline-oriented digital libraries Jason Scott Works about computer hacking

See also

References

External links