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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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