Over the last few years, textfiles.com has grown to be one of the biggest, if not the biggest text file archive in the world. Textfiles.com has an average of 42,000 hits per month!

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HackZero> Did you ever have an alias in your days on the internet?
Jason> Like many people when they first come into anything like a hacker or BBS culture, I took an alias or two. I first called myself "The Slipped Disk" from when I was 12 until I was 17. (1982-1987). On a particularly henious "Bombs n' Revolution" BBS called The South Pole in the 312 Area Code, I called myself "The Data Gorilla" because I was afraid they'd trace me back to my "real" alias. (How's THAT for unusual thinking?)

HackZero> What was the first box/system you ever owned?
Jason> My father brought home a Commodore Pet for me in 1979. With 8k of Memory, a cassette tape drive, built in BASIC programming language (Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) and an attached 5" Black and White monitor, I thought it was the greatest thing ever.
I still own it, although I've only turned it on 3 times in the last 5 years, mostly to see if it'll still turn on. If you don't know what a Commodore PET is, there's a great page about it here: http://www.jps.net/foxnhare/pet.html

HackZero> What got you interested in computer technology?
Jason> Dad used to bring home computers from work, whatever they had lying around. That, combined with opportunities to see the Thomas J. Watson Research Center that dad worked at, sealed it for me. Computers everywhere, doing cool things. I should mention I was never much of a programmer or, for that matter a math guy. I only program now when I have to; I lack that basic discipline you need to be really good at it. I currently do UNIX administration work to make money.

HackZero> When was textfiles.com established? Did it bypass any difficult obstacles on the way to its fame?
Jason> Basically, I looked around for information on an old BBS I'd liked called Sherwood Forest II (1983-1986) and found not the slightest mention of it on the web. This majorly bothered me and I resolved that in the future, people looking for the kind of storehouse of history that textfiles.com is wouldn't be disappointed.

HackZero> Did you experiment with illegal substances like some of the other well-known phreakers/hackers did?
Jason> I have never smoked a cigarette, drank alcohol, taken illegal drugs (outside of a hospital emergency room) or taken mind-altering substances of quasi-legal nature. Now, before you wonder what the hell I'm about, it just never seemed interesting to me during those vital teen years when you can really get an appetite for such stuff. I had the top floor of my home basically to myself, and I liked it there! So I had my nice computer, my pet ferret, and lots of friends who visited, and I just never really got into the whole drinking and drug experience, although I have an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of 1980's Teen Comedy Flicks (Gorp, anyone?) By the time college rolled around, I'd already found other things (like computers) to have fun with, and I didn't need to shut off part of my brain to have a good time. If you're willing to count teenage girls as illegal (or at least dangerous) substances, then I'd say I'd experimented plenty.

HackZero> Did you ever think textfiles.com was ever going to get known world wide like it is today?
Jason> Is it? I get about 70,000 unique sites visiting a month, but I suspect a lot of them are matches against my text, since I have a heck of a lot of text.

HackZero> Do you get alot of contributions from people sending in text files?
Jason> Yes, people have sent me literately dozens of megabytes of files. One or two people have sent me over 500mb of text. The process of going through all these submissions is what takes me so long. There's a lot of young people who send me in files they've just written, asking me to join their file to the ranks. I tend to put them into the "uploads" section (http://www.textfiles.com/uploads) as a way of keeping them separate from the historical stuff but also to thank them for thinking of me. I know if I was that age, I'd like someone to put my stuff up in a place for everyone to read, too.

HackZero> Do you read all/most of the text files on your site?
Jason> There is no file on the site I haven't read, which the exception of some of the larger (200+) file series such as HOE and FidoNews. The reason the site "only" gets a few hundred files added each week on average (check out http://www.textfiles.com/new to see how I'm doing) is because I take a look at each one and describe it myself. For every hundred that go up, by the way, I probably look at 300 and delete the others as doubles or corrupted.

HackZero> Is there any particular reason why the layout/design of textfiles.com is so plain/ordinary?
Jason> I'm a very big believer in form following function. That is, I prefer simplicty and straightforwardness in giving you the information the site has to impart. If, after adding the information, you can make it look pretty good, then that's a great bonus. I put a lot of thought into the look of the site. For many years, you had only white, green, or beige monitors to look at. Green was thought to be the best color for the eyes (supposedly it's the color the eyes tire the least of looking at) and so many of us who think back to that time think of green monitors. Obviously the advent of color monitors pushed this experience to the back room. The weird blinking line thing in the logo is a reference to the cursors that many computers have, although not many have that sort of underline, blinking cursor. You might see it in a few old science fiction movies. Wargames has a square cursor, as I recall....anyway. I've often found myself on a site which purports to be of an informational nature, such as listings of some television show, writing about some aspect of the hacker community (a "news" site of some sort) or maybe what's coming to be known as a "blog" or "web log". And in many cases, the person has caked so many graphics, java, and javascript onto the site that it's almost impossible to browse with any speed. If you have anything less than DSL and cable, you're screwed. And I'm saying this from the point of view of someone who does most of his work these days off multiple DS-3s. This is not to say I don't appreciate, browse, or send people to more graphics-oriented sites, and sites that are all about tricks and neat-looking graphics. After all, I'm a graphic artist myself. But one of the first things you have to do as ANY sort of publisher/artist, even a web-based one, is sit back and think about what your site is trying to accomplish, and then design the site to accomplish that. The purpose of my site is to bring to you the thousands of textfiles that were on BBSes and the Internet for the last thirty years. The HTML can just sit back and do what it's supposed to do, and the graphics can take a back seat to that. By the way, the site is also meant to be browsable in the text-only browser lynx (http://lynx.browser.org/). That plays a strong part as well. If you can't read the site in an 80x25 screen window, then I've REALLY forgotten my roots.

HackZero> Has anyone ever tried to make you shut your site down? e.g.(hackers, fbi, family, etc.)
Jason> No one has ever tried to shut down the entire site, no. I've had some issues with people over individual files. For example, someone found news stories he'd written a decade earlier for Newsweek and went completely bugfuck on me. What I thought were public-domain textfiles have sometimes turned out to be improperly transcribed books, and the authors have asked me to remove them (which I do almost immediately, after I verify that the file is in fact the book). On two occasions, my ISP shut down connections to textfiles.com when my bandwidth usage killed the connection into the building! The first time was when I put up the entire site as one single .tar.gz (220mb at the time) and hundreds of people were downloading it. The second time was when I put up bbslist.textfiles.com and it was slashdotted. No one else has even threatened to shut me down yet.

HackZero> Do you attent any of the annual "hacker" conventions? Such as Defcon, or Black Hat Briefings? If so, what do you think about them?
Jason>Yes, I've attended three DEFCONs and one HOPE. I've been invited to a couple others and will make a good effort to show. There's a book in that question. Basically, I enjoy them very much. I recieved one of the greatest compliments at a con, when I watched Grandmaster Ratte' (who you interview) do his thing for BO2K (which was the first time I'd ever seen him) and afterwards, get introduced to him and have him go "You're Jason Scott of the Works! I've always wanted to meet you!" You just don't get moments like that sitting in your room. Conventions, if you go to them to have fun and not treat them like their only purpose is to personally entertain and aggrandize you, can be wonderful. I use them to meet old friends, make a few new ones (I go around trying to introduce myself to people; textfiles.com has been good for that) and generally come away with something, through my own efforts. If done right, they're one of a kind. I suggest them to everyone. But leave the attitude and the cynicism at home. In a little jar.

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