WHAT IS THIS SITE?
At the center of it all, is the idea of the "textfile", a file written in ASCII. It could be an essay, a story, a few ideas presented to the world; it is the basic building block of human online communication. Easy to transfer from machine to machine, and offering the core ideas of the person who wrote it, textfiles have followed computers from nearly the beginning and flourished in the 1980s. Both on the ARPANET and on the thousands of Bulletin Boards throughout the late 1970's up to the 1990's, textfiles could be written by most anyone about most anything. And they were, and they did.

TEXTFILES.COM was founded in 1998 to stop a dangerous trend; text files written in the era of the 1980's Bulletin Board Systems were disappearing. Left on old hard drives and shoved into closets, these files were being rapidly forgotten, unreachable, lost to time. By putting up the original site, I'd hoped to stop the loss and provide a central place for people to send me their old collections (and in some cases, the actual disks and archives) and make that time come alive once more.

Ultimately, things have been a resounding success. With many tens of thousands of BBS-era textfiles, the site is one of the more popular on the internet and provides thousands of people a day with the files they were looking for. It has been used in school papers, quoted on many websites, and pointed to as reference materials by folks who are writing about online history.

But text file writing didn't stop with BBSes.

It quickly adapted and moved to the Internet, a long time ago. While text in any such form is the basic building block of most websites and information on the Net, there have also been folks who have specifically written files in the exact same spirit that the first textfiles and online magazines appeared in the 1980's (and before). By putting textfiles.com firmly into the BBS era, it was, by its very nature, missing out on these later-written textfiles. So, with a little effort, WEB.TEXTFILES.COM was created, saving all the textfiles it could that were written after 1995. This has, in itself, grown to many thousands of files as well.

(Some might wonder how a WEB.TEXTFILES.COM site could take in that much text, but the truth is that HTML has come and taken away a lot of potential textfiles and filled them with images, sound, and formatting. The TEXTFILES.COM sites don't collect all these more modern formats, but focus on pure ASCII. This makes the entire project limited enough to be realistic.)

But beyond the collected textfiles trickling into WEB.TEXTFILES.COM are the files being written right now at this very moment. Using computers many times more powerful than what came before them and hooked to connections of astounding speed, folks are choosing to write in basic ASCII and make their thoughts known on a weekly, monthly, or regular basis for others to read. These are the members of what is called the "Textfile Scene", "Zine Scene", or even just "The Scene". They are putting out textfiles constantly, in locations all over the world, on dozens of websites on the Internet.

So this website has been created, SCENE.TEXTFILES.COM, to make an effort to keep track of all these newly released files, these most recent accomplishments, and allow the folks who are making this effort a place to announce their work.

Also, this allows me to keep track of textfiles to bring on and mirror on the different TEXTFILES.COM sites, so that they're guaranteed to be saved past the lifespans of the websites they came from. Through a family of scripts, websites will be tracked and links to the local archives will be kept. Hopefully, this means that a current generation of textfile writers won't be lost as a generation before them came so close to being. Either way, it's worth a shot.

It's always worth a shot. Thanks for coming along and I hope you enjoy the ride.

- Jason Scott TEXTFILES.COM

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