Slashdot Mirror
Enormous 80s Textfile Archive
Jason Scott writes "I have opened a new WWW site dedicated to the textfiles (also known as "g-philes" or "etexts") that populated the BBS World of the 1980's. Of course, in doing so, I have also gathered together many, many files from the 60's, 70's, and 90's. The purpose of this is to provide a central repository for this important part of online culture to bring back memories or show where we came from. The site is called
www.textfiles.com and is well past 9,000 textfiles online. "
No text file archive is complete without I Bleed For This?!?!?.
IBFT is solely the best ezine ever.
Geez.... this was *my* generation
If you owned an Atari (400/800/XL/XE) in the 80's, and called BBSes, you probably saw Atascii A nimation movies. (Classics like "Uses for a Commodore 64", and "Journey Into the toilet"!) There is a site dedicated to these at the Break Movie Warehouse.
There is an on-line Java viewer for these files on that site.
Oh, if you have any Atascii movies that aren't on the site, please share :-)
Tony Smolar
(somebody ate my slashdot cookie)
This webpage captures the feeling of a BBS somewhat, but I think it would be really great if there was some sort of telnet access to the archive, to simulate a real BBS. I'm sure you would have no trouble finding willing volunteers to help you with this, and I think it would really enhance the atmosphere of the site to have both a web-based and text-based interface to the site.
Then we can all run console-mode telnet and pretend we are using our old XTs and 286s over 1200bps modems..... aaaahhh, those were the days.....
I now have the urge to get my old Tandy 1000 out and surf the old chicago area bbs's.
Sure, I'd expect everyone to remember this file! If i look around, I probably still have it archived somewhere. Gotta wonder how long those disks can collect dust and still perform. Of course all my Laser-128 disks performed like champs, so maybe they won't be too bad. Of course, none have sleeves.
Can't believe he doesn't have 40-hex in the virus section. I'll have to mail him those. Oh, and the Ninja-009 series, and... and...
I think I have on floppy somewhere the pre-4.0 WWIV archived (when it was written in Turbo Pascal). Run that sucka under OS/2 with SIO and lock the virtual serial port at 2400bps for the best possible simulation (so text scrolls onto the screen).
If you did the same thing with something a little newer like right before BBS's died, like maybe Renegade, you could run many such virtual lines.
Man this reminds me of the BBBB-BBS. Two of the best known names in Linux today ran the thing. They must have had about 20 megs or so of GFiles alone not to mention the ever popular message base "The Winona Ryder Lust Club".
God I miss that place.
Citadel/UX is still under active development. The code is easily available, so I'm sure there would be no problem locking the incoming data stream down to about 2400bps or so.
BBS's seem to be enjoying a small jump in activity and popularity over the last year or so. Commercial BBS leaches like Galacticomm and Mustang Software have been looking towards the web, leaving behind a small dedicated grassroots community, not unlike what we had in the 80's. Since FTP and HTTP are the preferred methods of transferring files, these BBS's are popular for the original reasons:
1) Games
2) Message bases
3) Textfiles! (less so because of the web)
And if you think telnet is slow, you were never around during the hayday of BBSing. I remember when modems scrolled on the screen slower than I could read. And the awe I felt the first time I connected at 14.4 at how *fast* things were (how could anyone possibly need to go faster than this?).
If I could only find a cheap permanant connection, or a cheap collocation plan, I would set my BBS up again pretty quickly. Now that all the jackasses are here on Slashdot, that leaves a few quality people on the BBS's to talk amongst themselves.
I remember a great story of a programmer, REAL early days, on a system with drum memory, who wrote in machine code carefully timed to be done with the instruction just as the next one came under the read head ... I had a seventy-eighth generation photocopy of it, original off of USENET, and it has long since expired. Anybody else have this one?
Jeannette
tr '[a-zA-Z]' '[A-Za-z]'
I found two files that I have written, and will be looking for more of them. The COSMOS file in the phreak section, and the Crisis Mountain and 'Theseus and the Minotaur' crack in the apple2 section.
Jason, a good idea wold be to try and stick a date/source on these things, where they are not obvious. For instance, I the cracks mentioned were from 1984.
You may be looking for the story in the Jargon file, accessible at:
http://www.jargon.org/jargon_49.html#SEC56
And, in keeping with the historical thread, I'll sign off...
tCS/BB
There's no RoR files on the archive as far as I can tell. In fact, quite a lot of the files I expected to find on the site aren't there. Maybe most of that stuff was more from out on the east coast?
On the other hand, there is still a *TON* of stuff I recognize. This is a great effort, if still entirely too small, and it saves me the trouble of starting my own similar site -- the idea for which has been kicking around for a couple of years, though I haven't acted in any way on it.
This is a term I've never encountered before!
For some reason, Slashdot seems to have broken the URL that I posted for the site.
It should be http://atascii.atari.org
Tony Smolar
(Somebody at my Slashdot cookie)
Hehe, this is the most fun I can have, while my ISP has a major routing problem, rendering my 2 Mbps ADSL line almost useless. I can only ssh to my university and then further to xs4all, another provider. From there on to Slashdot with Lynx, surfing right along to textfiles.com! Whoopee! ;-)
(Hm, wonder whether I can find some hints for my old Vic-20 Pirates Cove adventure...
mailto:jacco2@dds.nl
telnet to primenet.org ...
its hilarious!
"Workstation" is just a marketing tool to add some extra $$ to the pricetag of a higher end system. There is really nothing magical about them. Whatever the bleeding-edge desktop system is at any given time is usually called a "workstation".
I should dig up some of my computer shopper ads from 4 years ago and we can all have a laugh at what was then called "workstation" and sold for $5,000 or more.
While you may remember such days with teary eyes,
:)
I remember the pain and suffering of
trying to find information by download hundreds
of text files which contained nothing but crap,
eating whole days of time. Reading BASIC manuals that came with the C64 was about the only reliable source for a broke kid.
If I had the web when I was little I'm sure I'd be a better programmer today. I really think kids today have it a lot better. search engines, newsgroups, open source, etc. near instant access to information. Further, amazon.com, and other online book stores are making it possible for anyone to buy the information they can't find.
Course if I had the web when I was little, I probably would have spent a lot of time at porn sites! Who remembers TSR's that would display GIFS as they downloaded?
who are you?????? what are you??????
These text-files may contain cracker-material. Slashdot is ofcourse already working with local law enforcement personal to track down these evil kiddies (they may be older by now) and prosecute/execute them.. after all... they give us hackers a bad name.
Is that stuff hand drawn, or is there some program
to convert GIF (JPEG, TIFF, etc) pics to ASCII? Those pin-ups were like looking at photographs, in a way.
Now if they would make a java version,( or telnet with ANSI) version of Legend of the Red Dragon, I'd be set. No good boards around here anymore, they all left starting late '94.
Anyone know if there is an archive of 8BBS?
Man where are all of the ANSIS??? I remember back in the day there used to be tons of em...hell, ya'll remember the groups there used to be that would put out monthly installments?
ahh the days of being an K-RaD 3L1+3 K1Ddi3 hAx0r
Hey, my first box was a Trash-80 model 2 level b..
it had a whole 16k RAM.... it was one kick ass workstation.. i learned assembler on that puppy..
(not that I ever used it again)
"Way back in the day" we had to use PETSCII.
ANSI didn't happen until much later, when PCs and CGA displays were common.
That's easy. Excite for Web Servers is what I use under Linux. It takes some work to get installed (the scripts are totally hosed) but is well worth it. And because it uses a static index, it's quite fast. Just run the index process whenever you add fresh content.
EWS is also free (as in beer, not speech).
Of course, when I do the same w/ an internet connection, I can talk w/ Europe, Argentina, Australia, or Kathmandu. The BBS tends to be very localized (and if not, it is subject to delays as well.)
BBS's... If only I still had the time.
There's a GGI target for AAlib... upon which you could ostensibly display an image and dump to file.
AAlib rocks, by the way.
I vaguely remember hacking tymnet from a Model 100 with an acoustic coupler... from a pay phone at a coffee shop.
I think I had some cheesy BASIC program to scan network addresses.
Bwaaahahahaahhahahahahahaha aha ha!
(ow, I think I just hurt my sides)
Like, live in the "now". Get over it.
They only have the 100-question version of the purity test. I'll send them the 500-question version, along with the other 3 MB of stuff I have sitting around...
And we hope to someday use DHTML and/or Javascript to develop the first web-based messaging interface that doesn't suck.
Also, his site was the only site to email me and thank me for linking to him on my page, which I thought was pretty nice. You don't find many webmasters like that around.
COOL -
1. Concurrent Object-Oriented Language.A parallel version of C++.
"COOL: A Language for Parallel Programming", R. Chandra
<rohit@seagull.stanford.edu> et al in Languages and Compilers for Parallel
Computing, D. Gelernter et al eds, MIT Press 1990, pp.126-148.
Bahahaha.. You lose again, M$!
I feel like i'm missing out -- when most of these texts were written i was about 2 years old. I had a c64, but was way to young to appreciate it...I think I played last ninja on it, tho. that's about all i remember from that era :( Hrmph. Oh Well.
You might want to try a WAIS implementation like FreeWAIS. This is the sort of thing it's good for, and they aren't overly resource intensive. You will have to append to the "inverse files" whenever you add new content, but that isn't as hard as it sounds.
I read the internet for the articles.
Well, I agree that they aren't 1980s, but I wouldn't exactly call them "alive and well" either. I still call several local BBSs, but over half of the ones I used to call have shut down, including the last board running on an Amiga (that I know of) in the area. FidoNet is still the best of its kind though - webboards and UseNet simply cannot compare.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Man, I was barely into the scene and I remember THAT one... :)
That was around the time when 9600 was very common (I had a 2400)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
"Telnet too slow"
:)
Um, Telnet is as fast as your connection, man...
Hell, people here want to slow down Telnet for nostalgia's sake...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
My last Atari crapped out a couple years ago so I have no access to the tons of stuff I used to have archived on that thing. I have several printouts but I just can't see typing that stuff in. I might have some goodies on some floppies laying about but nothing really old and interesting.
I was very active during the mid-late 80's in New Orleans area BBS. I've actually used this alias since those days because revealing your "real-world" identity was verboten. Hell, the classic Assassin's Guild went down in January '98 after a 15 year uninterrupted run. I emailed the former sysop in the hopes that she'd still have some goodies laying about.
I have to admit, I miss being able to read as fast as the modem could put characters to the screen (300 baud). It's still weird to me that my parents actually understand the terms "modem", "online" etc. after all these years. I met some of my current best friends through BBS way back then when we were kids.
Thanks for the cool nostalgia.
I'm going to check and see if Ripco and Lunatic Labs are still around (Ripco was, as of a couple years ago, and was an ISP to boot)...
It's amazing how trivial stuff like this can trigger a flood of memories. Every time I see stuff like this (and recognize names, to boot) it seems like the world gets a little smaller.
Then again, maybe it's just Slashdot.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
This is more than nostalgia. Files like "UNIX
for intermediate users", "Bash shell programming"
and "How to use DEBUG.COM" are still just as
useful today as ever. Excellent archive!
Wow, there's a ton of stuff I remember from the 70's and 80's. Viewing them on high powered equipment such as the Vax and TRS-80 workstations. Nice work. Love the green - works very well with the site! :)
Yes, the Model 12's - large floppies, Xenix...
It was meant as a joke... :)
I'm having nostalgia overdoze!
Jón
I still honour odd tidbits from e-mail, the www and usenet and put it in $HOME/texts, but this page has gotta be the first that made me recognize that other people identified.
:)
It used to be so much fun, someone bringing up an obscure topic, and me saying, "i got a textfile on that."
(For those who have only a vague memory of UK BBS' in the 80's, the words "MUD" and "Essex", along with the address "A2206411411" may help.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
A file I wrote is in there, though it doesn't date back to BBS days.
This site comes up fine in Opera... Their server however seems to have a problem with Lynx. Anybody know what might cause this?
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
Hey, I have a 32 node license for Falken, and could set up whatever I want. 64k upstream bandwidth.. Need 128+ people on at once to make the illusion complete..
Try a few of the Worldgroup BBSes out there.. It's a new version of LORD, optomized for multiplayer (has a chat module and stuff)...
this site is most impressive. However, I remember one incredibly disgusting, but very humorous text file I read sometime around 1989-1990 called how to microwave a cat. Anyone got this one?
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
Hi,
/.-effect or the provider taking it
;-)
looks like the site is inaccessible either
due to the
down due to too much traffic... here's why:
> www.textfiles.com
Server: pickup.highway.bertelsmann.de
Address: 145.228.114.10
*** pickup.highway.bertelsmann.de can't find www.textfiles.com: Non-existent host/domain
bohoo! I remember calling San Diego based
BBS'es on my friend's C64 whose father did NOT
have to pay for his phone bills... those were
the days!
Uwe
Ever wondered whats wrong with the world? http://www.ishmael.org/
Anyonne remember this text file? I remember downloading it from a Milwaukee-area BBS around 1987. A classic, IMO! totally funny..
I really miss those days.. 1200 bps makes me all misty-eyed..
(haaz, ex "The Peeler")
-- haaz.
I take exception to the phrase "BBS world of the 1980's." BBS's are alive and well, and still offer a more interactive, online-community-oriented experience than the Web does. Long live the BBS! (And visit mine while you're at it)
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
It is in the Jargon file:
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/j argon/jargon_49.html#SEC56I haven't used my Atari ST and Atari 1200XL in SO long... I'll admit when I was a kid I used to collect this stuff (or was it 'stuph'?)
If my old floppies still work there are probably a few things I can send over. I remember when 90K text files tool FOREVER on my Atari 830 modem (300 baud)... and 90k filled 1 side of a single-density disk. And disk notching.. wow. I feel old.
hehe the resonant gravity coil...I truly never thought I would see that one again.
"We want to take over the world, but we don't want to do it tomorrow, it's OK if it's next week"-- Linus Torvalds
Here's the file: http://www.textfiles.com/anarchy/mism4.h ac
There used to be a BBS for those 18 and over in Portland called Enigma. They decided to close-up shop though after some punk-ass kid got onto the board, downloaded instructions on how to compose a bomb, and then FAXed the instructions to his father-- at work!
Needless to say, they called the FBI, and the site was apparently in hot-water for distributing such information.
And that brings me back to the days of Banished CPU... All those wonderful memories. It used to be nice when only computer-geeks were online. Now every moron with 500 bucks has a computer and treats it like a damned Nintendo.
After all these years, I finally find out what that rod does aside from scaring the bird. That was a tremendous game. I didn't realize that you could bypass so much and still get "Grand Master" status.
-Steve
I went to that site and looked on their message board, what should I find but LORD in java!!! It's been done and can be played on up to 6 servers, each with up to like 255 players. Jeeze, we had 2 lines on the little board I played on, and it was rare to see anyone else in the game at the same time...
Sorry about that, in my excitement to get logged in over there and start killing things and flirting with the barmaid, I forgot to include the URL to their page. It is not on the SethAble web page, it's at http://www.czone.com/lord/ Go and create a character now, and If you find Downlad in a field sleeping in server #5, don't kill him!
Except now it's how to have fun at Wal-mart. It's being forwarded by users who weren't alive in 1987. Eeek.
BTW, I used to have a 2400bps connection in 1996. That's when I decided that the Web has too many graphics for its own good.
This site really stole from my work time today : ). Ahh who could forget "Better Homes and Trashing, by The Saint" one of my all time favs... Didn't LOD come out with a LOD Communications CD a few years ago of all of the messageboards on their old bbses?
Jarod
Do you remember Tradewars 2000? I loved that game
It sahould be brought back as a graphical game with a central server for the internet.
Eh?
Nothing beats ascii nudies. I saw them long before I ever glimpsed the inside of a Playboy.
~fight the power >>-->kill your computer
Here you are.
http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html
--jwriney
John Riney III
jwriney@awod.com
dto!
It's about time. Sometimes you forget that any of
this happened anymore, especially when you "grow-up" and have some way of getting on the Internet. Back then, it was some great entertainment. I still feel that BBSs were more personal, on a level that the web has yet or may never achieve. I've only taken a quick glance of
the sight and have already found tons of files
I read so many years ago, many I have on the disks
of some old crappy C64 or IBM PC. I love the layut of the sight, since I viewed the whole BBS world
from my lovely green-on-black monochrome monitor and ran my own BBS from the same view, collecting all that stuff...Then again, now looking at my Xterm now up right now on my laptop...I notice the same green/black
scheme. Maybe something never do change. Hmm, Where was that stack of floppies again? I'm sure I've got a 5 1/4 drive here somewhere...and a C64 emulator.
I also wanted to answer a few of the subjects that came up on this Slashdot topic, just so everyone sees my answers.
First of all, not all of the textfiles are up yet. In fact, while there are 9,000 textfiles up, I have something in the range of 20,000-40,000 waiting to be sorted through! I just wanted to choose a good "break" in my work to invite the world to come see, so that I wasn't toiling in silence and darkness without sharing what I've found so far. So, expect that the site will grow even more in the months to come. A few people expressed unhappiness that I didn't have X file or Y file; in fact, I might very well have it, just not put up on the site yet. At worst, if people feel my site needs a certain file, they should send it to me at the above address.
A VERY large group of people have expressed that I should have some sort of search engine on textfiles.com, and while I agree with them, I don't know any way to do that and still have the system move with any sort of speed. If there's a really good indexing program out there, I'd like to see it, but the site is already into the hundreds of megabytes and I'm concerned that there's no easy way to do it. I have a sort of backup plan, however, and I may have the hotbot site do the work for me because you can search by domain. If this is the case, I will utilize it. Otherwise, I don't know if I can help with that.
There were some minor aesthetic differences that people have with some of my choices on the site. Where I can non-intrusively implement the suggestions, I will, but otherwise, I kind of like things as they are. It makes me feel very cozy and nostalgic, and a lot of users have agreed with me.
At some point I might sell CDs for people who want the ease of getting a piece of plastic instead of spending hours downloading files, and I will possibly look into T-shirts if there's an interest. This is mostly because I like T-shirts.
It might interest some people to know I am speaking at DEFCON, the annual technologist/hacker convention held in Las Vegas. I hope some of you decide to make the trip. I'd love to meet you and talk about the old days and the wonder of the new days.
Finally, textfiles.com is running on a Dell 486/33 box running Red Hat and apache, and it handled over 15,000 users today without any major problems. What a wonderful operating system, and what a great web server.
Yours,
Jason Scott
TEXTFILES.COM
...a program that does just that...converts gifs to ascii.
- jay
Heh