textfiles.com is a web site run by Jason Scott

Jason Scott Sadofsky

Jason Scott Sadofsky , more commonly known as Jason Scott, is an American archivist and historian of technology. He is the creator, owner and maintainer of textfiles.com, a web site which...

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

Bulletin board system

A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, a user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging...

 world and various subculture

Subculture

In sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, a subculture is a group of people with a culture which differentiates them from the larger culture to which they belong.- Definition :...

s. The site categorises and stores thousands of ASCII

ASCII

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...

 files. It focuses on text file

Text file

A text file is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines of electronic text. A text file exists within a computer file system...

s from the 1980s, but also contains some older files and some that were created well into the 1990s.

The site went online in 1998. According to Scott, the site had approximately 150,000 unique visitors per month as of 2004. An updated file count was last posted on July 1, 2005; at that time, the number of files archived by the site was 58,227.

Overview

The text files in the archive cover a wide range of topics, including anarchy, art

Art

Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....

, computer

Computer

A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...

s, drugs

Recreational drug use

Recreational drug use is the use of a drug, usually psychoactive, with the intention of creating or enhancing recreational experience. Such use is controversial, however, often being considered to be also drug abuse, and it is often illegal...

, Freemasonry

Freemasonry

Freemasonry is a fraternal organisation that arose from obscure origins in the late 16th to early 17th century. Freemasonry now exists in various forms all over the world, with a membership estimated at around six million, including approximately 150,000 under the jurisdictions of the Grand Lodge...

, game

Game

A game is structured playing, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes used as an educational tool. Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more often an expression of aesthetic or ideological elements...

s, hacking, phreaking

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. As telephone networks have become computerized, phreaking has become closely...

, politics

Politics

Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, including behavior within civil governments, but also applies to institutions, fields, and special interest groups such as the...

, piracy, sex

Human sexuality

Human sexuality is the awareness of gender differences, and the capacity to have erotic experiences and responses. Human sexuality can also be described as the way someone is sexually attracted to another person whether it is to opposite sexes , to the same sex , to either sexes , or not being...

 and UFOs

Unidentified flying object

A term originally coined by the military, an unidentified flying object is an unusual apparent anomaly in the sky that is not readily identifiable to the observer as any known object...

. Many ezines are also included in the archive. One of the oldest archives is the first decade (1923–1935) of Short Talk Bulletin, the monthly periodical of the Masonic Service Association.

The site provides a "glimpse into the history of writers and artists bound by the 128 character

Character (computing)

In computer and machine-based telecommunications terminology, a character is a unit of information that roughly corresponds to a grapheme, grapheme-like unit, or symbol, such as in an alphabet or syllabary in the written form of a natural language....

s that the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) allowed them." The authors of the phile

Phile

Philes commonly refer to files about hacking in the days of BBSs. Ph may have been originally used as homage to the phone/phreak.Other common abstractions of the word are t-files and g-files...

s are often anonymous or identified only by BBS pseudonym

Pseudonym

A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...

s. They have been collected from an assortment of different sources, mostly BBSs.

textfiles.com also houses a number of sub-projects with their own hostname

Hostname

A hostname 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, e-mail or Usenet...

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

Crack intro

A crack intro, also known as a cracktro, loader, or just intro, is a small introduction sequence added to cracked software, designed to inform the user of which "cracking crew" or individual cracker was responsible for removing the software's copy protection and distributing the crack...

s, ANSI

ANSI art

ANSI art is a computer art form that was widely used at one time on BBSes. It is similar to ASCII art, but constructed from a larger set of 256 letters, numbers, and symbols — all codes found in IBM code page 437, often referred to as extended ASCII and used in MS-DOS and Unix environments...

 and ASCII art

ASCII art

ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters...

 and other related documents; audio.textfiles.com has an archive of audio files, including prank call

Prank call

A prank call is a form of practical joke committed over the telephone. Prank phone calls began to gain an America-wide following over a period of many years, as they gradually became a staple of the obscure and amusing cassette tapes traded amongst musicians, sound engineers, and media traders...

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

Shareware

The term shareware is a proprietary software that is provided to users without payment on a trial basis and is often limited by any combination of functionality, availability, or convenience. Shareware is often offered as a download from an Internet website or as a compact disc included with a...

 discs

CD-ROM

A CD-ROM is a pre-pressed compact disc that contains data accessible to, but not writable by, a computer for data storage and music playback. The 1985 “Yellow Book” standard developed by Sony and Philips adapted the format to hold any form of binary data....

; web.textfiles.com contains files created after the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

 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. There are other sub-sites, and the set changes over time.

Most of the textfiles.com projects are "completionist" in outlook, attempting to gather as much information as possible within the decided scope. The goal is to preserve as much as possible for future generations. In the BBS List FAQ

FAQ

Frequently asked questions are listed questions and answers, all supposed to be commonly asked in some context, and pertaining to a particular topic. "FAQ" is usually pronounced as an initialism rather than an acronym, but an acronym form does exist. Since the acronym FAQ originated in textual...

, Jason Scott describes his work on the project as "an almost single-minded devotion to saving the past."

According to Jason Scott, the site has frequently been threatened with legal action. Its legality is questionable, because most of the material that it hosts archives of are presumably copyright

Copyright

Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...

ed by their original creators. Its legal status depends on interpretation of fair use

Fair use

Fair use is a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work. In United States copyright law, fair use is a doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders...

 provisions in copyright law. Scott argues that the records of the BBS era would be lost, were it not for his and others' preservation work. As of 2004, most of the files in the archive are not expected to legally pass into the public domain

Public domain

Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...

 for decades (since most files originated in the US, where copyright is for the lifetime of the author plus 70 years), and the continued public availability of the archives could be considered electronic civil disobedience

Electronic civil disobedience

Electronic civil disobedience, also known as ECD or cyber civil disobedience, can refer to any type of civil disobedience in which the participants use information technology to carry out their actions. Electronic civil disobedience often involves the computers and/or the Internet and may also be...

 if not fair use.

External links

• www.textfiles.com The site
• Enormous 80s Textfile Archive — 1999 Slashdot
  Slashdot
  Slashdot is a technology-related news website owned by Geeknet, Inc. The site, which bills itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters", features user-submitted and ‑evaluated current affairs news stories about science- and technology-related topics. Each story has a comments section...
  
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