ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Every BBS Textfile Ever —

Well, not quite, but close to my original dream. As I gave in a speech at DEFCON 9 a couple years back, it was my hope that eventually the collection of textfiles.com would become just another “ware”, a singular, tradeable “thing” that people could pass back and forth. By building it up into a multi-gigabyte collection, it got on the radar of people who were trading CD images with nary a care. Well those times have come and are spreading like wildfire, thanks in no small part to programs like Bittorrent.

Like any other file-trading mechanism, Bittorrent has its share of fanatics and detractors; file me in under the fanatics. It’s rotten for files under 2-3mb, but files like that can be sent as e-mail attachments without causing any problems. It’s those big files, those massive collections of data that Bittorrent shines for. Yes, it’s good for movies and albums, but it’s also good for sending, oh, say, all of textfiles.com. Additionally, its demand that it get the whole file at once means the original file stays pristine, and the the model it puts forth for uploading and downloading means that the more people interested in it, the easier it tends to be to download. Is it perfect? Heck no! But what is?

I used to joke about “I’ll trade you textfiles.com for etext.org, but those times are here. Now! I’ve bought so much into it, I created a site that allowed you to download all of textfiles.com:
torrent.textfiles.com.

If you were looking (and hey, you might have been) for an excuse to download Bittorrent from Bram Cohen’s site, now you have one. Grab it, go to torrent.textfiles.com and begin pulling down a roughly 700mb-900mb file of many thousands of texts, more than you’re likely to ever read.


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