It's been a while since I've added any major amount of vintage textfiles to the main site. When people send me their own creations, I quickly add them to the uploads section; that works out to maybe one or two files a week. But I'm happy to say I added over 120 new adventure walkthrough files, most of them from an archive of files grabbed about a year ago.
I don't know how many people really care about the process of adding new files to textfiles.com, so I'll just say that I use a combination of perl and bourne shell scripts that "do the right thing" when I place new files into the directories. I haven't hand-made a directory for the site since the first month of operation, some five years ago. The scripts let me take a swath of files, be shown them, describe or delete them, and then integrate them into the right location. Variations of the scripts maintain all the sites, and is how one single person can maintain all this information. I get accused of "having no life" because of the sea of files through the sites, but in fact it takes relatively little time to maintain.
In the case of these files, they're all pretty much Adventure Walkthroughs, an interesting subspecies of file that began as early as the late 1970's and has continued to the current day. The concept is both simple and intriguing: in the case of games where a complicated set of moves or choices are required to "solve" it, a person will write a file describing those exact moves. Some of the walkthroughs are literally that, a set of commands that, if you type them in exactly, will put you through an entire game until you are victorious. Others are a little more subtle and drop hints and ideas to push you towards making the final "a-ha" yourself.
What was most disconcerting about this collection of walkthroughs was how some were written as late as 2000 and 2001 and some dated back as far as 1983. So you would have examples from the late-and-lamented Mines of Moira BBS along with things obviously grabbed off someone's web page. I try, as always, to date the files as accurately as possible, but it's not always to be, since the pedigree can be lost over the last two decades.
If it's not obvious, I have a weakness for text adventures, those ascii-only games that depended almost entirely on literary ability to create and abstract thought to solve. Few games can claim that, and in the modern age of the DirectX library and the DVD-ROM, I think there are games crafted with the same exquisite skill but not with the same intense result that I got internally from these games. Hit the dragon, move south.
While I'm a person who despises intrusive and unwarranted advertising in previously clean and ad-free spaces (a concept best typified by urinal ads), that doesn't necessarily mean I hate every single last aspect of marketing. Just most of it.
Specifically, when a company or entity designs a product or service and, instead of just shoving it out in a working state, goes to a marketing or design firm, the results can actually be quite beautiful. In fact, the resultant imagery can go so far as to become a treasured part of one's life at the given time.
It might seem bizzare now, but as a child, I used to pick up magazines like Compute! and Creative Computing, circle every last number on the back of the "Reader Service Cards" in the back, and then sit back and wait as dozens and dozens of 4-color mailings would show up at my house. I'd gather them all up, take them to my room, and open them like presents. Many of them were dreary photocopies of some lifeless text, but many of them were fantastic little pieces of fiction, describing computer programs for the Commodore 64 and Atari as the most realistic, mind-blowing experience you could hope for. At the very least, their advertisements promised this. And really, who needs comic books when a candy-colored mailing tells you about all the incredible features of a new video game?
To this day, I still have all those mailings! In fact, I started a project some time ago to grow a slave-race of digitizers in the Boston area to take all these little nuggets of history and get them online; the project has gone nowhere since I've been so focused on my documentary. When it's done, maybe something will come of it. Until then, you can glance at the aforementioned box of leaflets and letters and see how much there is.
Buried among these different works, there were artists whose work still has an effect on me. For example, I immediately connected with the work of Scott Ross, specifically with his work on "Preppie!" and "Preppie! 2" for Adventure International, but also for all his other computer game covers, which I coveted by cutting them out wholecloth from the computer magazines I owned. Just the existence of his stylish "Ross" signature on a piece of art got my attention. While I couldn't afford many of the programs his artwork appeared on, in the case of Preppie! for the Atari 800 I saved up the money (literally, nickles and dimes) to take the bag down to the local computer store and buy the game. On a data tape. Which took 20 minutes to load. What mattered to me was that I could take this incredible program home, with the Ross artwork on it; the fact the game turned out to be really decent was a bonus. How backwards a kid could be about a product!
(There's a solid interview with Scott Ross here.)
The box art for a slew of Atari Cartridges had the same effect on me. They ranged in quality, sure, but for the best of the best, you were looking at some wonderful paintings, portraying events that were peripherally attached to the experience within the box. One only has to look at the artwork for a game like Othello for the Atari 2600 and see a master at work. Compare that artwork to the actual game; the difference between the program and the artwork... it nears galactic levels. And for whatever reason, this doesn't anger me in the least.
As adults we become cynical, tied to the idea that whatever is being offered to you, it sucks, it doesn't work, and there's something that actually works and is cheaper just 10 feet away. We inherently do not trust ourselves and the people around us, because enough negative experiences have occured that it's safer to just shut down the hatches and walk away from things because you won't be hurt, killed, or ripped off. As a child, you don't have these defense mechanisms, and while perhaps that sets you up as a potential statistic or sad story on the 6 o'clock news, it also means that you're ripe for the ultimate headrush: a fantastic yet believable promise. That first time you see a cartoon mascot promise you that the sugar-coated cereal you eat will send you into an amazing jungle or kingdom, or the first time a game box cries out to you and claims that once you buy it you will be inside an amazing world where everything is fun for the rest of your life, you are delighted. Until the toy reveals itself to be a little less than your wild imagination assumed it would be, you are absolutely excited and tingly and plotting in your mind how you will scope out and explore this new world. That feeling is so strong, so powerful, that it only comes in small portions in later life. I know I feel something like it when an exciting programming setup like Graham Nelson's Inform shows itself, or when I find a semi-obscure cache of neat photographs on the internet, waiting for me to pore over them. For you, you might have something else that gets the juice flowing, but probably never like that first time, totally buying in, so beyond gullible you have achieved a sort of personal holiness, floating gracefully over the world with your dreams.
The fact is, all well-done presentational art could be construed as a lie. Maybe it's not a lie in the formal sense of a direct statement advocating a mistruth like "This can of poison will not kill you". But it grabs the eye, portraying an uplifting and possibly life-changing experience, and then leaves you with a handful of dots on a screen to remember your money by. This is, make no mistake, a subtle bait-and-switch scam. But at the core of it, it is a masterfully-crafted lie, and the world is so full of uninspired meanderings and poor-quality creations, that even well-made falsehood must be admired for the effort it contains. Lies, it seems, are inevitable: a fact of modern existence that both eschews privacy for convenience and dismisses difficult questions in return for pat answers. But at the very least, we can relish the human effort in constructing a breathtaking falsehood for implied (but self-serving) good.
This article, for example, is a lie. One gentleman's perception of the world around him presented as factual and true, when it is riddled with opinion and recounted personal experience in place of hard information. But if I write well enough, the reader considers this understandable and takes what I say as that; editorial opinion, preferably one whose opinion coincides with theirs. Is someone really reading a weblog entry about nostalgic memories of marketing and having their opinion changed?
All these gerrymandering statements aside, I did recently run into a concrete fulfillment of a dream, and I suppose it was inevitable it would come from Apple, that never-ending fountain of implied dreams and tasty presentation.
While visiting a friend recently, he let me try out his iPod. As I was admiring its lines, it occurred to me how many dreams converged in it. Storage, Durability, Cool... many of these were implied in computer products for a very long time. And here was a small machine, with gigabytes of disk space (gigabytes!), feeling like plastic that was as tough as metal.. no obvious moving parts, just a hint of controls on the front, interfacing with other machines seamlessly. Unbelievably expensive, true, but real, and in my hand.
I couldn't help but feel that, at least in some small way and with the proper application of a good amount of your discretionary cash, the promise of 20 years ago was finally being kept. Here's hoping the world can keep more.
I could tell by the phone number on my caller ID (217) that I probably didn't know who this was. 217, that's Illinois. Probably one of the usual telemarketing calls that want to offer me telecommunication services or reams of copy paper for my (non-existent) business. All of my domains basically point to the same phone number, so who knows which it is.
"Hello, 217! How's Illinois!" was my greeting.
There was a pause. I was waiting for either a click, or the deep intake of breath before the spiel begins. Either people call a wrong number, or they have to reassure themselves against my voice before launcing into a scripted hit.
"Is this... Scott Jason?"
Excellent.
"Yes, it is. Actually, Jason Scott. So you got Scott Jason because of a screwup on the domain name form. So what's up?"
Pause. One can figure he's a little uncomfortable that I've told him what state he's in, the first three digits of the phone number, and how he found my number, and I've given him nothing.
"You run textfiles.com?"
"Yes, I'm the textfiles.com guy."
OK, now, generally, when people steel themselves up to call the telephone number to talk to me, they are of some extreme mind when they do so. Either they are so taken in with the history and the meaning of all these thousands of writings from years back, they want to thank me (this actually does happen) or they've found something that pisses them off so completely and totally that they have to make their mind known, and e-mail just isn't enough for it.
Unfortunately, this was the latter.
"I just want to know how you can live with yourself encouraging people to commit credit card fraud. You have a file on your site that tells people how to do it and you are encouraging them."
Wow, it's been a while since I've had one of these.
"Well, sir, I have many thousands of files on the site, which are collected from the era of bulletin board systems. They are very old, they are of historical value, and they provide historical context to that time. I distinctly do NOT encourage them to commit criminal acts. In fact, I doubt any of those files even work."
I can't help but feel that the caller wasn't entirely expecting this; I'm not one of those lame "@NARCHY" sites which have a bunch of old files HTMLified and combined with animated rotating skulls; I'm really doing something I believe in and have been doing so for quite some time. Or maybe that fact made them even more mad.
I decide to go for it. "Which file are you referring to, specifically?"
"The Video Vindicat...."
"Sir, that file is from NINETEEN NINETY-TWO."
I hope the intonation is understandable; it would be laughable that credit card companies would be open to fraudulent techniques a decade old, or that those techniques even possibly worked at the time. Did you know that the number one reason that hacking and phreaking BBSes went down was as the direct or indirect result of Credit Card Fraud? The fact is, my friends, it doesn't work. If it works for you, you are either seriously playing the odds or you have a meeting scheduled you don't know about yet. Credit Card Fraud automatically incites the pursuit of federal agencies, who have very large budgets and very specific goals. It's like going outside in the Everglades and punching alligators. Sure, you might get away with it... maybe. But the resultant pain would never make it worthwhile.
"You realize that by printing these files, you are commiting a criminal act, you are doing something illegal."
"I am? How is that?"
"You are facilitating a criminal act by printing instructions on how to do so."
"Sir, there's a good hundred years of case law that disagrees with you."
The pause was palpable.
"You... are a BAD BOY."
Well, that's something.
"Is there anything else, sir? We're not going to resolve this here."
"Well, no, I guess you can live with having no conscience. And one of these days you're going to go to jail."
"OK! Goodbye!"
It took about 2 minutes to look up the phone number that called me and find their e-mail address. I figured that I'd mail them back and discuss things a bit more rationally.
I got mail from the president of the company that had called and they explained someone had attempted (note, attempted) to defaud the company using credit card information that matched some aspect of a Video Vindicator file. From this, the employee had decided to contact me directly, no doubt to vent anger.
I wrote back, and since I think these issues affect any site with unpopular information, I would excerpt it here. I am not identifying the company in question because it would be needlessly harassing.. and really, beside the point.
Several things... I didn't write the file, I disclaim its
contents, I certainly go out of my way on my website asking people to NOT
follow instructions in the files that are contained on the site. With over
75,000 of them spread across the different sites, they range from the
tawdry to the sublime; if you look at my "top 100" files:
You can see more of my historical context to the files and thoughts on
their place in the history of BBSes. Some of them are certainly tawdry,
but none of them are "mine" in the authorship or ownership sense.
Now, I am certainly subject to concerns by folks like yourself, good
people making an honest living selling [product]. It is actually
quite a rare event, and certainly even rarer that I am personally
threatened, so I have time to answer in full, just as your
employee/relative took the time to research my phone number and call me.
Your caller, and, perhaps yourself, have a themeatic line of making me out
to be some sort of conscience-free monster; devoid of morals and
delighting in aiming mankind towards a general ruin. I don't happen to
think this is the case, of course, and wouldn't appreciate that
characterization without the existence of further evidence to back it up.
I understand the anger and hurt when one's livelihood is defrauded; I
truly do. And while I'm sure it would be more satisfying for you to track
down and arrest the perpetrator the credit card fraud, it is certainly
easier to find someone with similar information and a phone number.
You have, fundamentally, no proof that the file even came from me. I
collect BBS-era "shovelware" CDs from throughout the late 1980's and early
1990s, and the work of Video Vindicator shows up on many of them, simply
because his writing was so evocative. I am one of a thousand sources on
the internet.
But setting that aside, you have a situation that some errant soul used
information from a 10 year old textfile to attempt to commit credit card
fraud, one of the most-prosecuted and dangerous crimes a person can commit
without the use of a weapon. Many, many people have been heavily fined and
gone to jail for this crime (and rightly so). The fact that anyone would
attempt that, to me, is inherently foolish and showing that they could
have dervied inspiration from any of a number of sources, none of which
should share blame because a nonsupervised tot got a hold of his parent's
web browser.
I consider myself a librarian in the truest and most honest sense. I
understand if you snort and giggle.... To bring up the obvious arguments: the
first amendment was not written to protect popular speech, I (and many
others) consider these files (no matter how misguided the authors at the
time) to be of historical and cultural import, and I dispute their
existent as purient, obscene, or the declaration of flames at a cineplex.
I understand your anger, but I will not consider myself the root cause of
it. And I am far from evil.
- Jason Scott
TEXTFILES.COM
The following is an interview conducted over e-mail with me by APC Magazine, a technology-based website and print magazine in Australia. Since this website gets a few hundred people a week and the print magazine gets many tens of thousands, I see no issue with posting it here as well. If you live in Australia, stop reading and buy the magazine, I suppose.
On Mon, 3 Nov 2003, Maher, William wrote:
> Do you think we are experiencing a BBS revival?
The word "revival" is a little strange to me, because dial-up BBSes as a foremost entity of communication can't compete with the speed, breadth, and pure financial investment into the Internet that has occurred in the last 10 years; that's why they've disappeared off the popular radar.
However, for a good number of people, BBSes never went away, they just became ISPs or moved to servers that were Internet connected or otherwise found a way to survive. And for people whom BBSes were a nice, pleasant hobby, not unlike skateboarding or going hiking in the woods, they simply became other people and moved away from expressing themselves that way.
They made up the majority of BBSes out there, so that's the driving reason for the perception of BBSes as a "fad" or "wave" that would come, build to a peak, and then crash.
Really, though, those people are now running websites or webpages or posting on various discussion groups or mailing lists. It's not like they all suddenly died and walked away from computers and never wanted to think about BBSes again... they just aimed that part of themselves towards where the action is.
I should also mention that there are a number of BBSes, still single computers with modems hooked to phone lines, around the world, and in some pretty good numbers. So they're as strong as ever in that regard, although now a novelty to people who don't know any other connectivity but Internet.
> Have you been surprised by the level of interest?
I'm not at all surprised, because this specific subject has been given such short shrift by history. BBSes were a means to an end, and it was easier to talk about the end: hacking, computer usage, video games, or what have you; anything where you could put pretty pictures up (or in the case of computer hacking, scary multicolored images) as opposed to what, on the face of it, sounds like a tedious subject matter.
Obviously, I think differently, or I wouldn't have spent the last two years working on this. And part of the reason there's such interest is because of what I already knew: hundreds of thousands of people used BBSes. The people with the money to buy computers or the brains to acquire one cheaply. The people who wanted the most access to the most computer "stuff". Folks who find themselves quite at home on the Internet, or at least comfortably using it and making themselves available through it.
When they see a documentary is coming out about BBSes, they immediately harken back to that earlier time, and when they see the names and terms come back after years of disuse in their minds, they're swept up in the dream. And so it's my job to fulfill the promise of that dream.
Essentially, I hope for my documentary set (there's multiple episodes in the documentary) to give a sense of the feeling of running and using BBSes, as well and covering in some amount a large variety of BBS-related topics, topics which simply don't have any context in other computer related subjects. I don't think, for example, that there was much of a chance of a video-based fidonet documentary before this. (Although maybe this documentary will inspire others, who knows). I certainly know we weren't looking at a documentary covering XMODEM, ZMODEM or PUNTER protocols, and the chances that anyone else was going to track down the creator of .QWK packets was... slim. (Although they wouldn't have been disappointed, if they had.)
Recently, a group of talented members of a demo group called Hornet put together a DVD of PC "Demos", those programs showcasing music and video tricks that played (and still play) on computers and are part of the "demo scene". For people who never ever heard of any of this phenomenon, it just drops to the floor and out of sight, but if you in fact downloaded some or went to demo parties or anything like that, it was like hearing a favorite band was reuniting. I find it funny they named the project "Mind Candy" because that's how I would describe the interaction of this memory and experience of earlier years, combined with the utility and ease of a DVD: It was like some tasty candy in your brain. I knew that if people who experienced demos in the 1990s (or earlier) became aware there would be a DVD coming out with this stuff, the two biggest bottlenecks would be how long it took to get their credit cards out of their wallets, and how much effort you wanted to take waving the product under the noses of the right people. When it got on slashdot.org, thousands flew out the door. Some people would be surprised this was the case, but anyone who knew the forces at work wouldn't be. I think those same forces will be tapped by my documentary set.
By the way, the Mind Candy Demo DVD is described at http://www.demodvd.org.
> Are people keen to connect to BBSes, or just talk about their past BBS
> experiences?
Like old video games, I think people pine for BBSes but their tastes have increased in sophistication and demand that a lot of BBSes simply can't hold their attention. Web-based discussion boards have evolved into these crazy icon-based link-filled experiences for a reason, after all; people want that stuff.
However, like anything else, if the people are good and the conversation is good, the "rustic" interface works for people just as well as it always did.
So I suppose what I'm saying, in a greater sense, is that people ARE keen to connect to BBSes, as long as they're BBSes worth connecting to.
That said, of course, there's a lot of people who think of BBSes not as a hobby or part of themselves but as a phase in their life, like high school or wearing their hair a certain way. For these folks, BBSes are "over" and they're more interested in it as a trivia exercise, or because they're curious about what else was happening with other parts of the culture back then. They wouldn't log onto a BBS now any more than they'd go out of their way to walk around the halls of their old elementary school.
> Why would people be interested in finding out about old BBSes?
I've long ago gotten away from trying to "Sell" the idea of why BBSes were interesting. They either are or they aren't on their face. I intend for the documentary set to have a short introductory film about BBSes, just putting down the fundamentals, for people who never ever heard of them beforehand. Like a lot of subjects, the vast majority of people interested in the subject experienced it directly or indirectly and want to get more of a handle on it, or something horrible/astounding happens in a subject and everyone wants to know the "inside story". If neither of these situations happened, the documentary becomes a little less interesting. If you own a computer, however, you probably know something about BBSes already and this documentary will give you the option of a ton more insight into them.
My primary motivation behind the documentary is to save an important piece of history. Folks like me are doing this all over the world, and I'm sure they think of the rescuing/collecting/research issues first, and the snappy slogan a distant second.
That all said, I think people might find some amazing human stories in what seems like a computer-geek subject, and they'll certainly not hurt for lack of variety in these stories. That, I can guarantee.
> Do you think increasing problems associated with the Internet, like spam
> and viruses, has anything to do with people's interest and nostalgia for
> BBSes?
Only slightly. BBSes had a different set of problems, and a different set of ongoing issues, some of which (over-popularity of a single-line BBS but no money coming in to expand, sysops growing bored with their BBS but the software stability so good the BBS is on life-support for years) never really got solved before websites started becoming a new way to express yourself. It was certainly not an endless path of sunshine and rainbows. People who weren't on them who pine for them are misguided in that same quaint ways that people pine for living in "simpler times", which actually means "lacking anesthetic, toilets, dependable roads, sanitation or freedom from persecution".
There was an Apple II virus in the early 1980's. Multi-chat systems like Diversi-dial had built-in forced advertisements. A lot of these downers existed beforehand; so they're kind of the nature of people in some ways.
Naturally, of course, I wouldn't trade my times on BBSes for anything, but I wouldn't want to throw out my current systems and internet/web access for them either.
> Do ex-BBS users complain about the state of the Net?
I get a lot of mail with a lot of opinions about the current state of the world and drawing parallels and vectors with the percieved state of BBSes way back when. Sometimes I agree and sometimes I don't, but the whole thing was a different experience for different people, which is part of the magic.
I do believe that there were/are a segment of greed-driven folks who have no interest whatsoever in the positive aspects of the Net and who think of it as a great opportunity to make it a popup-choked flash-ridden porno pipe. There are definitely more of these folks than in previous decades and the presence of even one or two can ruin your time like ants in a picnic. So I do agree with folks there.
But I'm one of those crazy folks who think the internet just shot governments (as we knew them) in the head, and no amount of posturing/legislation/back-room trickery will change that. If I want to, right now, I can talk to somebody across the world or organize a mailing list of like-minded folks in an hour, I can send 20 years of collected textfiles from textfiles.com to someone in under a day, I can digitize most anything and get it to others in almost no time for almost no money. I happen to think that rules.
> Do you think these problems make the BBS days look even more idyllic?
I would say that without a doubt this is the case. Just like it's very hard for current OSes to compete with the stability of the old single-user 6502 and similar-based OSes (simply due the complexity), it's hard for the Internet with all the aspects and involved parties to really compete with the BBS experience for straightforwardness and simplicty. While there are plenty of cases of downers, harassment and some of the other harbingers of human nature in the BBS story, the whole thing seems like it's quite surmountable compared to today's world. As we barrel down towards advertisements in BIOSes and viruses that can potentially embed themselves into phones, I'm sure we'll pine for the "simplicity" of today's world as well.
Well, the most interesting thing about the BBS list was the number of stories old sysops and users felt they needed to send me out of the blue, simply because they were so delighted someone remembered them, even if the extent of their years of work was boiled down to a name, number, and year span.
Keep in mind the experience many sysops have with the list. They look up their name in Google, curious to see where it's linked, and they see it associated with a name they'd long forgotten, the name of the BBS they ran years ago. They click through, and here's this massive, massive list of bulletin boards, all with year spans, software, sysop name, and all the names their BBS went through. The effort on my part has been relatively minimal; a series of perl and bourne shell scripts scrape BBS lists from all sorts of places that I'd been collecting anyway. But the shock of seeing this formal pantheon of dial-up boards bring many of them to highly emotional states; I've been told more than once of sysops crying as they see that someone, even someone who never called, has made an effort to remember their BBS. For others they lurk among the other BBSes in their area codes and they see all these other names of places long past, so they get really nostalgic for those times and share as well. I honestly didn't expect any of this when I set out to do it.
So after a large collection of hundreds of these stories came in through e-mail, I realized there was this untapped saga in human history, the story of the BBS. People had known about them, they'd gotten a lot of people their first taste of being online, but there wasn't any program out there that had done justice. It was as if folks were more than happy to discuss freeways and bridges and racetracks and motor oil, but never to discuss the car. It's a very odd gap once you start looking at it, and I had started to look at it.
Since I had a film degree, I figured it might be neat to go after such a project, collect stories from all these people and see if I could make something of it. That was 2 years, 167 interviews, thousands of miles, and lots of money ago. I have a short number of further interviews to do, and I'm well past 200 hours of footage. It's been something else.
In terms of interesting outcomes of the documentary filmmaking so far, a lot of them center around myself: first time I've visited Texas, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Oregon... had the undivided attention of millionaires and people just scraping by... halting a 30-year slide into prejudice and dismissal of a lot of the world by focusing too much on 'book-learning' and ignoring real people. And meeting heroes, both personal ones and ones in the truest sense of the word. You can never meet enough heroes.
In a more general sense, this documentary is providing a base for others to build work off of; I know of a couple documentary-like projects coming from specific groups inspired in part by my documentary filming, and I hope there's even more when it comes out. That would be great.
> Any good stories about old BBS buddies linking up again?
Interestingly enough, I've not had cases of people who were on old BBSes linking up with people they were on with, that I know of. I suspect after the documentary comes out and people's faces show up, as well as publicity surrounding the BBS list and related materials comes with it, that there will be a flourishing of old ties and forgotten friendships, which would be fantastic.
> Do you think BBSes are facing extinction?
In a world where people collect glass telephone pole insulators, where you can buy brand-new Model T parts, where people are still programming new games for the Atari 2600, and where I recently took a ride in a elevator that has been running for over a century, I am not concerned about anything related to "extinction" for dial-up BBSes, and telnettable BBSes or web-based message boards are experiencing anything BUT extinction.
If you confine the definition to dial-up BBSes, no, it's going to be pretty much impossible to snuff out BBSes; they're just too powerful a thing and they've got 20 years of intense programming behind them to make them resilient, dependable, and cheap to run. Right now you can have incredible computers with modems built in that are the size of what used to be a CD drive. And smaller. While we want to think of the whole world being attached to cable modems and counting their downloads in dozens of kilobytes a second, that's not the case, and BBSes fulfill a need for the people without such connections. I think they can consider themselves quite safe for the moment.
> Is there much debate in the BBS community about whether to do away with
> Telnet and text interfaces?
I am not qualified to speak of the whole of the current BBS community, especially considering how many fragments it's in. But I can give some idea of those fragments.
You can't beat text interface for speed or universality; I can't imagine people are saying there shouldn't be BBSes that use that ability. And the same with telnet, although I think you can make the argument that ssh might be a better choice.
Web-based and telnet/text-based BBSes are dissimilar animals, solving different problems and presenting different interfaces to (often) the same data. I think it's going to be more and more the case that people will have fun adding every possible interface to a BBS and letting people make their own choice to read and post using Java, their cell phone, a PDA, some weird IRC interface... whatever floats your boat. At the end, in the core, there will be some "there" there, some community that matters to the folks on it, and it won't matter where you're coming from.
There have been a number of attempts by folks to bring together various metacommunities of BBSes, that is, communities of people who simply use BBSes who want to debate things. I don't see this as wildly successful because the people using BBSes and BBS-like technology are so variant. But they seem happy with where they're going, so who am I to say?
I think the biggest "debate" in BBSing these days is which ones are the best. Just like it's always been.
> We are an Australian magazine, so I'd love to be able to say if there's
> any news about expanding the list to include Australia? Can you say
> when?
Here's the fundamental issues involving that.
I'm an American, and I know the North American Numbering Plan (area codes) of this part of the world very well (you couldn't use BBSes nationwide and not get a pretty cozy relationship with them). As a result, I coded all the scripts and other programs for the site with those in mind. I also was able to put in stuff handling area code splits, as well as transferring of BBSes between these area codes and other anomalies associated with them.
In the case of other countries, I simply don't know about them well enough to consider adding such a list. The reason there's a Swedish list on the site is because there was a guy from Sweden who said "You need a list" and I said "If you'll do all the work" and that's just what he did, gathering information on how phone numbers worked in Sweden and allowing me to make modifications to the scripts to import his lists. Without him, it would never have happened.
All it takes is a driven (insane) Australian (or any other country) volunteer who wants to teach me how his country's phone numbers work, and I'll add that country as a sub-site on the BBS list. Do what you know, and do it well, is my motto. If you try to make it that your system or website has preparations for every possible contingency and trying to make everyone happy, you'll never get off the ground. The BBS list is well on its way, and I hope over time that I'll have an awful lot of countries listed, but I need help. I am, at the end of the day, one guy. Which I hope inspires your readers as to what one guy can do.
I wrote this article a little more than a year ago, after entering into an argument with someone trying to get me to sell his product on my site, wherein he told me I was being obtuse and out of touch after I refused. I've reprinted it here because you are technically a different/new audience, and also to show that not all my writings are uplifting rainbows and sunshine.
I thought I'd write a little bit about the idea of advertising on the Internet, since the subject has been coming up more and more wherever I happen to browse (i.e. "The End of Free", "The Free Ride is Over", "Pop-ups Now Rule the Web", etc.) and I figure there's no harm in giving my opinion. If you're the kind of person who doesn't really want to hear the opinion of the person running a site like this, I entirely understand and you can stop reading with no guilt whatsoever.
I essentially abandoned BBSes for the Internet around 1989, still using a few local boards but spending the vast majority of my time on the (relatively) small number of attractions on the Internet. I know this is hard to believe now, but the Internet offered an amazingly educated audience and set of users who could be depended on to post some really thought-provoking writing and otherwise communicate in a forward fashion. Jerks and haymakers were, even within their own contexts, amusing and complicated figures in themselves; Compare Batman's "The Riddler" to, say, a teenager with a pistol.
Advertising in these early days was pretty much forbidden; as the Internet was primarily the province of non-commercial entities (schools, government) any attempts to put commercials or otherwise inject advertising into the Internet could get you quite a bit of wrath and in some cases actual phone calls to the entity providing you your connection, ending in a quick cut-off.
Like everyone else, I was very excited when I brought up a Mosaic Browser in 1993 and saw this "all-in-one" experience we now call the World Wide Web WWW). It seemed the logical conclusion for similar technologies that had been appearing before (Gopher, WAIS, telnet) and I'm happy to say that along with a few friends, I helped bring a really nice website up and running in 1993 (http://www.tim.org).
What I'm saying is, I've been at this a very long time. I have the history to pull from, and I have the experiences that I remember from over a decade ago to compare to what we have now. I'm not coming into the whole goulash within the past few years and suddenly making major pronouncements. So here goes.
It took a while, I'll grant that, but using the Internet (and by that I mean web-browsing) has become a fairly combative experience. Your websites are choked (and in some cases overrun) with advertising. Your mail accounts are filled to the brim with unsolicted offers of sex and mortgages and hundreds of consumer goods. You are sometimes misled by search engines directly into porno sites that sieze your browser and change your bookmarks. Pop-up ads are now filled with sound and graphics and demand your acknowledgement before you can make a single move on a website.
Essentially, you are no longer a valued part of the entire exchange: You are a Click Monkey, a mindless automaton attempting to retrieve content that may not even exist, like a toy robot running into a staircase and pitifully whirring against the first step.
While most webmasters will not admit this to your face, many of them have dangerously bought into the Lexicon of Marketing, where you measure the success of your website by the number of people who connect and stare at your ads, bringing in pennies with every click-through. In this backwards world the content is besides the point except as a means to keep you on the site, and the meaning of the site is pushed ever backwards to get the audience to walk further down the aisles past screeching banners and demanding buttons. Marketing turns a website into a platform for an ever-rotating cachet of uncaring Masters, each only interested in shoving their carefully-crafted "purchase" message down your throat.
Marketing's allure is itself very attractive; this is why otherwise bright and intelligent teenagers choose to major in it and learn how to laser-focus their abilities to make a populace want something it previously didn't know about. Why they go into such a dismal landscape of subtle treachery and misdirection is kind of hard to understand from the outside; at a stretch one could convince yourself that the messages that you will drill into the minds of children an the inattentive will make the world better... but this is almost never the case. Instead, you will use a paintbox of fear, uncertainty, doubt, and sexual tension to bring your client's message to the forefront of the minds of potential customers the world over. There are barely words to descibe how low you are.
It was inevitable that Marketers would come to the Internet after it opened to commercial interests; only Marketers promise revenue based on lack of effort. That is, all you have to do is candy-coat your website with a number of alluring banners and the money will come to you, pulling you out of your own personal financial swamp. Wealth or at least a humble self-sustaining income will be yours for the mere cost of a few inches of your website. This is a very, very powerful message, if you don't notice the Pimp behind it.
At this point, I'll mention what you've already figured out: textfiles.com doesn't have advertising. It doesn't use banners, it doesn't use pop-ups, it doesn't harvest your e-mail address and spam you, and it certainly doesn't make you click though a number of "read this" pages to get to the content. It's all there, quite freely available, easy to download and get to. I wish I could say that this site was the norm, and it's rapidly becoming obvious that it is not.
None of my mirrors (bless them) contain advertising on their textfiles.com sites either; once they do, they're not listed as mirrors anymore. On several occasions I have been offered a mirror site, if I just allow them to cake their fetid banners all over the content. When I say no, that's just not going to happen, I get back the one thing that truly angers me: The Indignation.
I understand disappointment that this potential new "revenue stream" will not be available to exploit. I expect a sort of dumbfounded silence at why I am literally throwing away all this glorious green money. But I do not understand that segment of the population who think that the slathering of advertising is doing anyone a favor, and who come back at me with righteous jabs at my luddite-esque reluctance to turn textfiles.com into an advertisement for low-cost server hosting or a pointer to an endless landscape of vaginas. In some cases, I have recieved insulting, critical paragraphs from people who I've turned down, telling me to "get with it" and join the "real world".
Indignation, to me, betrays a complete lack of understanding of the reason that websites were created in the first place: to provide content. These are the same minds that put billboards over urinals and in hospital waiting rooms, who coat subway cars and school hallways with posters, who see no issues with DVD discs that force you to watch a logo every time they're inserted or with "non-commercial" public radio that begin every show with five minutes of who the show was brought to you by. They look at every spare moment of life as a potential to sell you a product. Every square inch of unused space is a place where an ad should be. Every last bit of meaning in the world should be "presented by" a corporate entity.
Advertising does nobody a favor. They turn everything into a sales pitch, they present glossed-over facts and figures to convince you their goals are the logical conclusion, and they will always sacrifice unpopular ideas and uncomfortable truths if it increases accessibility. All-ages blandness will always triumph over messy introspection and the questioning of meaning, in their book. It is a sad, colorless world they prefer, with the only color coming from their latest campaign. I hate everything they stand for.
Textfiles.com is free: free of cost, free of restrictions, and free of any advertising. I am not paid by anyone to say anything. I am not in the employ of some firm using me to get "clickthoughs" or "sticky eyeballs" or whatever the term is this week. I am here to give you the history of the BBS and to take the site in whatever directions branch from that. I am having a glorious time doing it, too.
The site costs me hundreds of dollars a month to run. I consider it the best spent money in my entire life.
- Jason Scott
August 21, 2002
Some time after textfiles.com started to gain popularity, I found more and more examples of files that post-dated the BBS era, but which were pretty much in the same "spirit" as the files on the site. The problem with just dropping them into the mix was that I was encountering issues where files about "How to Hack AOL" were showing up next to 1983-era Apple II soft documentation. After a while, you wouldn't be able to find what you might be looking for.
So, after agonizing over the issue, I created web.textfiles.com, which contains textfiles created in or after 1995. I started dumping hundreds of text files into that site, and luckily (or unluckily?) the number of people creating actual files using ASCII text and not HTML and derivatives is rather small.
Where did 1995 come from? Mostly a somewhat arbitrary decision that 1995 was when the Internet went from being a pretty neat communications medium to a must-have for the computer-oriented and then just the computer-owning. While there's been a lot to dislike about the resultant entity, there has been a lot to like, too. That's probably worth another entry some time. But regardless, 1995 has been a pretty good choice, looking at the content on the two sites. In some cases, I'll see something so entirely historical or important to the BBS era that was written post-1995 and which shows up on the original site, but this is pretty rare. The new batch cares about AOL and getting free accounts on geocities and never ever ever using a mere 80 columns. Or, for that matter, line breaks.
The site has taken off nicely and has a few thousand files, now. When I find new ones, I throw them in handily, and I don't worry about the original site becoming unnavigable.
The success of this site has encouraged me to create more. As a result, there have been a number of textfiles.com sub-sites, including audio.textfiles.com (the mp3s and .wavs of history) and BBSlist.textfiles.com (the world's largest BBS list).
So I suppose it was inevitable that as of last night I have loosed PDF.textfiles.com upon the world, which will include many files in the Portable Document Format created by Adobe. For better or worse, it is pretty soundly established as a de-facto standard for document layout and transfer, so there are some very fascinating and involved writings and posters coming out in it. Like any metalanguage that has descriptions of the things inside it, a lot of the quality of PDF comes as a direct result of the person creating it. If you just scan a bunch of documents as bitmaps into your PDF and send it out into the world, it's going to be a horrible bloated mess. However, if you take a little time and knock together some of the standard methods of shrinking a PDF including the use of postscript and vector graphics, you end up with a small, slick, fast-moving document.
I must rush to state that Adobe has some aspects of being an evil company, specifically in the realm of the Dmitry Sklyarov case, which I won't belabor here. To balance my seeming acceptance of their document standard with a need to sleep at night, I think we can see a number of anti-Adobe documents making an appearance on the new site. Think of the irony of having anti-Adobe creations in their own document format!
Additionally, a glance through the PDF site will reveal a lot of my personal interests and biases: refurbished Atari 2600 programming manuals, unusual academic papers on such subjects as the economies of online multi-player games, and infamous documents that have some amount of controversy associated with them. The two current examples are the paper on Microsoft's effect on security in the industry that lead to Dan Geer's dismissal, and the MIT Guide to Lockpicking, which MIT long ago disavowed and goes crazy when someone mentions them in association with it. It being "The MIT Guide to Lockpicking". You know. MIT. Lockpicking.
As time permits, I will add additional files to the site, and you can see how fast I grab up everything everywhere. That's what I'm into, bringing information into a central place, and just letting people have their fun. Eventually, I hope, historical context will come with the content, but that can't happen if the content can't be found.
And by the way, there'll be an html.textfiles.com about a week after a pile of printouts falls over and crushes me.
