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The entire thing is available as a torrent. You can download it all and then grep through it to find your site.

http://cd.textfiles.com/gw2k42...

see figure one, Holmes!

Roblimo was a special guest on this Slashdot Geeks in Space audio episode.

• Steve(GRC) Gibson's Blog ("http://feeds.feedburner.com/SteveGibsonsBlog")
• ASCII by Jason Scott ("http://ascii.textfiles.com/feed")
• RobOHara.com ("http://feeds.feedburner.com/robohara")
• The Baffler ("https://thebaffler.com/feed")
• Ars Technica ("http://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/index/")
• Slashdot ("http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot")
• Technology - The Huffington Post ("http://www.huffingtonpost.com/feeds/verticals/technology/index.xml")
• TechSpot ("http://feeds.feedburner.com/techspot/news")
• Wired Top Stories ("http://feeds.wired.com/wired/index")
• The Australian | Politics ("http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheAustralianPolitics")
• Al Jazeera English ("http://english.aljazeera.net/Services/Rss/?PostingId=2007731105943979989")
• Australia news | The Guardian ("http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/australia/rss")
• ABC News ("http://www.abc.net.au/news/feed/46182/rss.xml")
• Arduino Blog ("http://www.arduino.cc/blog/?feed=rss2")
• Lifehacker Australia ("http://feeds.lifehacker.com.au/LifehackerAustralia")
• MakerBot ("http://www.makerbot.com/feed/")
• Open Electronics ("http://feeds.feedburner.com/OpenElectronics")
• PlanetArduino ("http://feeds.feedburner.com/planetarduino")
• Raspberry Pi ("http://www.raspberrypi.org/feed")
• SnapFiles - 20 latest freeware programs ("http://www.snapfiles.com/feeds/sf20fw.xml")
• SparkFun: Commerce Blog ("http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/rss.php")
• TechCrunch Gadgets ("http://feeds.feedburner.com/crunchgear")
• The MagPi Magazine ("https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/feed/")
• Thingiverse - Featured Things ("http://www.thingiverse.com/rss/featured")
• GitHub Engineering ("http://githubengineering.com/atom.xml")
• BBC News - Science & Environment ("http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition/science/nature/rss.xml")
• English Wikinews Atom feed. ("http://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NewsFeed&feed=atom&categories=Published&notcategories=No%20publish%7CArchived%7CAutoArchived%7Cdisputed&namespace=0&count=30&hourcount=124&ordermethod=categoryadd&stablepages=only")
• F-Secure Antivirus Research Weblog ("https://www.f-secure.com/weblog/weblog.rdf")

also relevant : see figure 1

The first BBS's I logged onto were at 300 baud, and were Commodore 64 based, generally running C-Net. Wonderful stuff. Later went on to regularly use BBS's running many different packages on many different platforms. The most common was WWIV, but Telegard, WildCAT, Opus, (I think often referred to mistakenly as "FidoNET" which I think is an inter-BBS message transport system, but I could be wrong.), PCBoard (often called PCBoring), Renegade, Synchronet were all widely used. I ran the only PowerBBS system I knew of in the area. It was a native Windows application. (and not a very good one!) ;) I ran across this list: http://bbslist.textfiles.com/ Perusing around the area code I lived in back then brings back tons of memories. So many sysops that I knew, including several that are no longer among the living, a few friends, even a few lovers. It's good to see some of their names haven't been forgotten! There's a few there that might be best off forgotten, too! ;) Time to share this article to a few of them!

I ran my own bbs back in the 80s/90s running my own software. I do t remember if anyone in here remembers this website asking for contact from old bbs operators but for nostalgia, http://textfiles.com/ (including its list of bbs that existed through the years)

I'd worry more about how to save games between sessions. How can they do that? Without leaving a browser window open forever? These Amiga games...there are a few shoot-em-up arcade style games, but most of them are in-depth experiences that take weeks or months to finish. You need to save your game and come back later.

I think they don't/won't/can't implement this functionality and thus this playable Amiga archive is worthless.

The dosbox emulator they use does save games. http://ascii.textfiles.com/arc.... It might be possible (or is already done!) for SAE

They found kilobytes and kilobytes of nudie RTTY art. The only one they could have published was this one so they decided to just put the floppies back in the box and forget the whole thing.

Yep. 'The Cloud' is just shifting responsibility to someone else, who may or may not be doing a proper job of security or backups. This seems germane.

While the claim is extraordinary, the idea behind it isn't new, at least as a science fictional concept. I remember first reading about a vacuum drive in Arthur C. Clarke's Songs of Distant Earth, (c) 1986. In his acknowledgements, he credits a certain Shinichi Seike with providing the theoretical basis for the idea in a paper written in 1969 titled "Quantum electric space vehicle". Interestingly, I can't find any mention of Shinichi Seike in Wikipedia either as a standalone article or by typing in the name in the Wikipedia search form, which should turn up results for pages that contain both "Shinichi" and "Seike". Other references to him on the English language Internet appear mostly in poorly formatted web sites suggestive of the rebel science community

Going back even further to the original Anarchist's Cookbook:

http://cd.textfiles.com/group4...

> Jason Scott of Textfiles.com Is Trying To Save a Huge Storage Room of Manuals

SLASHDOT, WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT????

Save something like http://textfiles.com/groups/ME... :
"When you fight niggers, try to stay away from there Fro's cause it'll make
your hands greasy and you won't be able wrestle them down. Come to think about
it, even there skin is greasy and they smell like piss! Better take my first
hand experience and use a bat on the bastard. Its less of a hassle".

???

SLASHDOT, WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT????

I downloaded much of the files at http://cd.textfiles.com/ and antivirus went berzerk.

To illustrate just how much content I'm talking about, here is a list of BBSs just in the Cleveland area code of Ohio where I grew up:
http://bbslist.textfiles.com/2...

There are 759 BBSs in that list, representing just one little slice of Ohio. Each one was a microcosm all unto itself. There are dozens of different types of BBS software represented there. Each BBS was hand-crafted and configured by the individual sysop with the style, color, behavior, etc, and hardly any two of them were even remotely similar. It was a point of pride for sysops to have a unique looking board, and they were updated often. Some where awful, some were great, but they were all handcrafted extensions of the people who made them. Each had its own character and personality, and the discussion forums and online games drew different types of people together. Some were mainly gaming BBSs, running multi-player online games like Trade Wars ( http://geekswithblogs.net/cwil... ), others had tons of shareware files you could download, others focused on discussion forums and communication, and of course others delved into the darker realms of illegal file sharing, etc. But again, they were all unique, and they are all gone.

http://www.textfiles.com/sex/E...

Are dolphins fish,

On the flip side, what you can do with JavaScript Apps today is far beyond most of what could be done with native apps in the late nineties. There are even a number of system emulators written in JavaScript that fully emulate systems from the late nineties....

They won't even talk to a little player, or anyone else who is unlikely to place an order for large numbers of chips.

They need to realize that big players start out as little players. I remember seeing an interview of Steve Jobs, and he was asked why they used the 6502 in the original Apple. He listed several technical advantages of the 6502, and then said that none of those factors had anything to with their decision.

No, his actual words were:
"fuck if I know, my nerd did all the technical bs, I could sell you insurance and I wouldnt care less"

Maybe you were referring to the Woz interview?

They used the 6502 because Motorola had given Woz a free sample.

the one where Woz said they used 6502 because MOS, and NOT motorola (motorola was busy trying to sell $300 chips), MOS sold 6502 at $25 out of a jar at Wescon in single quantities with no NDA/moq

you know, this one :
http://www.textfiles.com/apple...

    "WOZNIAK: In 1975 an 8080 microprocessor cost $370 and you could only get it
from a distributor set up to deal with companies, not individual computer
enthusiasts. The 6502 was introduced at Wescon with a unique marketing
approach (thanks, Chuck Peddle) and was sold over the counter (like register
chips at the local surplus stores) for $20. I bought mine from Chuck and his
wife themselves."

Luckily there's an entire guide available to stalking the wily hacker.

Whistleblowing, witness protection, for example. For most other cases anonymity degenerates into a cesspool of behavior that is not accepted in normal society. See every unmoderated anonymous internet forum ever.

We are talking about pseudoanonymity here, not anonymity. And we are talking about moderated discussion. I disagree that it is only usefull in special circumstances. Using real name is big security risk for anyone. Internet is vast and you never know what deranged individual will take interest in your person. If you provide your real name, you are opening yourself to several identity theft related attacks which can be very nasty. This is very old topic which was perfectly explored for example in this article Anonymity and privacy on the network from 1992.

I do remember reading reprints of this quite prescient April 1st article 30 years ago.

                http://www.textfiles.com/humor...

The last time someone's music got into my kernel it was Sony with a rootkit. At least these folks are open about nabbing root.

They really screwed the pooch on this deal. Since their name is 'netcat', I'm waiting for the song to be released via telnet server as ANSI music. That way I can netcat the netcat album with my cross platform old school Codepage 437 + PC speaker enabled terminal emulator from GNU, Linux, BSD, OSX, iOS, Android, Windows, MSDOS or even DR-DOS. Maybe I'd buy in if the cover art was a sick scroller.

In all seriousness: Any FLOSS publicity is good publicity. Windows or Mac folks can run Linux in a VM to try out the audio; It's not my cup of tea, but sort of neat.

They missed a trick tho, they could have had a few of these under the Other OS's title :)

Since it's a financial crime, I would expect the Secret Service to be handling it and hold the property. The FBI does the investigation but not the arrest and seizure of property. Source - I knew this guy, who got busted by them for piracy (albeit not well - friend of a friend kind of knew him).

Who believes that all rules are silly? It's only the rules people don't like that are silly.

No, it's rules that they don't understand that they think are silly. And evidence shows that many people who use cell phones believe there is some magic involved that carries their voice to the intended recipient. That's why back in the 90's a vocal group of idiots managed to get laws enacted to insure their privacy while using analog CDMA cell phones. After all, it was a CELL PHONE and they had every reason to expect privacy in their conversation, even though they were using RADIO to send their VOICE over the public's airwaves. Thus it became illegal, and remains illegal to this day, for the sale or import of certain kinds of radios that can receive frequencies allocated to cellular telephone services.

Indeed. See also http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1717

As much as everyone may like Myst, it's not technically special. The only thing going for it would be the use of multimedia/FMV. Even if FMV appeared in other games, it doesn't mean those games are any good.

Gameplay-wise, Myst takes an Alpine Encounter approach to the puzzles - you can bypass most of the game if you already know what to do.

The puzzles themselves are mostly control-room puzzles - click on something, and something happens some distance away. The back and forth travelling, although a good way to examine the landscape, isn't good for those who want to get along with the plot.

It boggles the mind that anyone would suggest something like this and then use the excuse of "well we only run on app on a box". That's such amateur hour nonsense. It's like running your cloud apps on classic MacOS or an Amiga.

Just because you've only got "one app", it doesn't mean that you've only got one process.

It sounds like running your 2013 server apps on an OS from 1985 but "in the cloud".

[shake head]

http://jsmess.textfiles.com/

That emulates a bunch of old computers, even 1985 ones. Runs on the cloud. Just need some server apps for any of them now...

Personally, the biggest issue that I see when I have encountered this type of situation is that the original programs are on floppies. If this is the case, you will need to find somebody with a Windows/95 machine that they're keeping together with spit, bailing wire, gaffer's tape and good intentions - you should be able to copy the program onto a USB key and then burn it on a CD/DVD for more permanent storage.

3.5" floppies are no problem - although getting a bit scarce, it's still pretty easy to get USB-connected floppy drives. It's the 5.25" floppies that are hard. Although I didn't expect to need to do this, I recently found that life would be better if I could get a bunch of data that lives only in a few files of 5.25" floppies.

There are a number of solutions to this, but few are just plug-and-play. It also depends on whether you need to be able to read and write the floppy as an application would, or whether you just want to scrape the bits off and save them in some kind of container on another filesystem. (I was looking for IBM-format floppies, but realized while I was researching this, that this is probably the time to grab the data off my old Commodore floppies as well - I was surprised to find that many of these 5.25" interface solutions are capable of reading floppies from darn near anything - C64, Apple, Atari, Amiga, etc. As a result, a couple of these are C64-centric, and some are read-only.)

BTW - Lots of folks will say that disks this old cannot be read. IMO, you'd be surprised how often the data is intact even after decades. I suppose it has something to do with the fact that these older disks were considerably less dense in the first place, making them more resistant to the vagaries of time-based magnetic bit rot than newer more dense media.

Here is a rundown of what I found - this will no doubt be handy to anyone with the same problem:

http://webstore.kryoflux.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=1&products_id=30
http://store.go4retro.com/zoomfloppy/
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2503
http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html

So far, the focus has been on just getting the data into the archive before anything happens to it. The metadata will come, and will come faster with some help.

Some more info on the current state of the file collections mentioned in the summary

What? Never heard of ascii? It's more then not just handing someone a @-}--- in chat or IM and yes VT100 compatible!
textfile art

Under-appreciated, you say?

On CP/M:

• WordStar, one of the most influental word processors of its time. Even today, several character-mode text editors make use some of the shortcuts which originated on WordStar.
• The CP/M operating system itself, which was quite popular back in the day and gave inspiration to PC-DOS/MS-DOS.

On the Commodore 64:

• GEOS by Berkeley Softworks. Who would have thought the venerable C64 could host a GUI system almost making it comparable to the first Macintosh models (not quite, but suprisingly close, given the 8-bit processor, memory limits etc.) There was a host of serious productivity applications for this environment.
• PageFox: a desktop publishing system for the C64.
• Microrhythm: a digital drum machine based on the undocumented sample playback features of the SID chip.
• The SID audio chip, which was way more feature-rich than its competitors of the time, and in some ways comparable to a “real” synthesizer, giving actual character and resonance to computer music, instead of just beeps and blips. Its creator, Bob Yannes, later went on to found Ensoniq, a company which designed and manufactured actual musical instruments (keyboards, samplers, etc.) The SID was a unique piece of audio hardware which enabled the musical software of the C64 to do its magic – and its legacy still lives on in the form of numerous emulators, vast sound archives and libraries (such as HVSC), custom-built musical instruments based on the chip (such as the SIDStation), etc. This is one of those cases where a piece of hardware has been inspirational and influental and enabled a number of software applications which would have been pointless if it weren’t for the hardware.

On the Amiga platform:

• (The Ultimate) SoundTracker by Karsten Obarski, later followed by the even more popular, more advanced clones or derivatives: NoiseTracker and ProTracker. These started the whole computer music “tracker” genre as we know it today – with four sound channels in a stereo arrangement and digital instrument samples, no less.
• Audio Master, one of the first digital audio sample editors for an affordable personal computer. Supported stereo sound as well. (Often accompanied by inexpensive audio digitizers attached to the printer port.)
• Deluxe Paint by Dan Silva of Electronic Arts – the first paint program for the Amiga. Taking a different approach from its predecessors on other platforms (which were mostly toys), the Deluxe Paint was a very powerful bitmap graphics art package, featuring advanced multi-color blitter-enhanced free-form brush handling features and color cycli

People didn't like New Coke, but that didn't mean they got to sue for fraud because it tasted different.

They couldn't sue, but they could sure as hell complain about it on the internet^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H BBSes.

History of MUD scripting languages, actually. But it'll get fixed, Jason Scott is doing some real preservation work on the topic of MUDs.

The constant pruning of *nix window managers as being less notable and less-cited than one-scene pornstars who won an AVN award, though, will probably rot on the vine.

I went to highschool in New York in the mid-80s. We had about 30 Apple IIes in the lab. The school had an introductory course and an advanced course. We programmed in Applesoft BASIC entirely for both classes and assistance from PLE, a memory-resident program editing aid.

Programs we wrote in the advanced class:

• Parse first names from a list of full names given in inline data statements
• Read numbers and text from binary files
• Draw a border around the low-res graphics screen with an animated a pixel moving inside of it
• Animate a walking man using high-res shape tables
• Play music notes using a provided machine language sound routine
• Play a song from a binary file containing notes and durations
• Perform a binary search of inline data statements
• Create and query a fixed length database using multiple search terms (ie. cars: model, engine, color, doors)
• Create and sort multi-column databases using bubble and shell sorts
• Find integers whose values are sum of the their digits cubed (eg. 153, 370, 371, 407)
• Write a game to test and score knowledge of state capitols
• Final project: point-of-sale application with inventory management using a random access, fixed record length database

Once upon a time, when I first got on the Internet (late 1980s), there was no anonymity. Sysadmins voluntarily adhered to a policy where each user's online identity and their real identity were linked [rajivshah.com]. If someone ever found a way to break this link, it was considered a bug [google.com] which needed to be fixed. It was staunchly enforced by admins who believed the net would devolve into a morass of misbehavior if people were allowed to post anonymously.

I belive soon after the internet spread beyond the few academic institutions in late eighties, there started a discussion about the pros and cons of real names and handles, about corresponding security issues etc. There is very nice article about this topic on textfiles.com from 1992: http://www.textfiles.com/100/anonymit
After reading it, i think that the usage of anonymous/pseudoanonymous nicknames and handles in internet discussions is more then justified.

No, cassette tape is not yet "in" (but I'm waiting, with a drawer full of 90min chrome), but these are: http://digitize.textfiles.com/items/1983-alloy-computer-products/ Maybe Alloy, the engineering company, not the distributor, will rise from the dead so that I can finally back up my Winchester disk again.

Most of what I wrote is based on Operation Sundevil, which is covered pretty well in this book:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/101/101-h/101-h.htm

There is some other information scattered around:

http://www.textfiles.com/news/2600dcr2.txt
http://www.totse2.com/totse/en/zines/cud_a/cud664.html

It is not terribly hard to find this information, if you are curious. As bad as things may have gotten in the US, we have not quite stooped to the level of China when it comes to covering up aggressive government action.

He's worked with law enforcement in the past, probably to save his own ass, by helping take down warez BBSes in the 90s. Search for "kimble" in http://www.textfiles.com/phreak/PHREAKING/bob-4.phk

ascii art

Least we forget..

http://www.textfiles.com/100/anonymit

Maybe it's just nostalgia, but I can't remember geocities being that bad.

I think it's just nostalgia.
http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/

Whale is more than 20 years old now, and it was polymorphic. An issue of 40hex from 1993 provides source for a polymorphic engine. This isn't a new development, the technique was "mastered" 20 years ago :P

Maybe they've seen a recent spike in it, but... who cares? Well, unless it means they'll put a little more thought into AV than signature-based bullshit. "heuristics"-based detection that isn't a complete joke, for a start.

cd.textfiles.com is my personal favorite shovelware repository. Loads of nostalgia to sift through there, the internet wouldn't be the same without it.

I go to textfiles.com and read some of the old docs I remember from my BBS days.

That would be the "self updating" part. It should be noted that "updates" can happen more than once in the course of both program execution and the life of any particular computing system. I'll state for the record that my personal view on any compromise is that it's a lot like sex: once you're penetrated, you're fucked. However, that doesn't mean that continuous adaptive updates won't protect a huge number of users.

Given your exceptionally low UID and the supposed credibility that comes with it, I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and suggest that perhaps you've had one or five too many whiskeys this evening (Lord knows I've had a couple myself). However, the mods that rated your comment "+5 Insightful" should hand in their Critical Thinking Cards ASAP, because in all truthfulness your reply is nothing short of reactionary garbage, minus even the trivial amount of analysis a Fox News correspondent might attempt to apply to the matter at hand.

Posting as a die-hard Debian & BSD user, btw. Also, greetz from the 404. Wildcat4lyfe.

If you have an io.com shell account, we would like to gift you a lifetime free rsync.net account for the purposes of backing up, and parking, the contents of that shell account.

I have never had an io.com shell, but between rsync and tar+gpg+ftp you should be able to quickly and easily dump the contents of your shell to an rsync.net account.

Just email info@rsync.net and we'll set this up for you. FWIW, this is a continuation of our efforts to support the work being done by Jason Scott, the "Archive Team" and the safeguarding of digital history, generally.

Here some reference material: Under Construction

Another thing is that there are layers of abstraction over the raw terminal emulator interface, like readline or curses. The first tries to make editing a command a smaller pain, the other one's role is essentially to turn the terminal emulator running on top of a grid of character cells... back into a grid of character cells.

You have very good ideas... They've been around for a LONG time. Great minds think alike. Ncurses let's you do all of what you're talking about, but you have to write some code to achieve the effects -- the terminal(emulator) just displays text/color/styles, it's up to the application (in this case the command shell, BASH?) to provide the features you're looking for....

With ncurses you can create movable, overlapping windows with "drop shadows" (darken background of bottom & right bordering text), independent scrolling areas, progress bars, animations, simple-music/sound effects, Space Invaders, Brickout, Tetris, etc. all able to interface with the keyboard & mouse (if the terminal supports it: see terminfo). In fact, text based GUIs, and even ANSI art were the norm just prior to the Internet/HTML explosion... For my late 80's / early 90's era BBS I coded up just such a windowed interface (sans mouse input) for "high speed" 14.4Kbps users -- It had features today's Web2.0 sites are just now catching up to (I still have CP437 committed to memory as a result).

Don't worry, you're not the only one who wanted to re-design the system... I wrote half of a terminfo parser (to detect which escapes to use for the features the terminal supports) to achieve similar ideas myself before I discovered ncurses -- Hey, I didn't know any better; I was a newly converted *nix user / MS DOS hold out & reluctant Win user at the time... Now, I've learned that the biggest part of being a "unix geek" is communicating with & hanging out with other "geeks" (esp. online) -- Sometimes the geek network is much better than any other search engine (New-fangled "social networks" have just recently begun to capitalize on these effects).

Well, the idea is to take our 80x25 grid of characters and provide a completely raw, low-level API to it. API like, "put glyph 0x41 in position 0,0". curses can do that, but it's two unnecessary layers of abstraction, so better just take an X terminal emulator, rip out all the terminal emulation code, and provide THAT api over it. Now, the second step is to let a library manage this area - if you want to emulate a VT100, just put a VT100 widget in there. If you want to run a curses-based program, it would make sense to port ncurses to use this backend. But the most interesting thing (IMHO) is the new (old) text user interface that I've conceived.

Well... Get to Coding! (just kidding, you actually don't have to). However, if you did start out on such a project (as I did) you would realize why there are so many messed up layers -- it's for backwards / forwards / cross-terminal compatibility. I was a die-hard DOS coder, I feel your pain -- My DOS text GUI applications had access to the text memory buffer: Every other byte was a FG/BGcolor&blink byte, with character bytes interleaved (ASCII +cp437), and it was simple. A breeze to work with, but it wasn't very cross platform.

Perhaps you would like to check out GNU Screen? (Since it does just about everything you mentioned).

Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells. Each virtual terminal provides the functions of the DEC VT100 terminal and, in addition, several control functions from the ANSI X3.64 (ISO 6429) and ISO 2022 standards (e.g., insert/delete line and support for multiple charact