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Hello. There are two groups of people who have found this web page. One of them are the web browsers who stumbled upon my site, textfiles.com, by coming in from the main page, interested in learning about the history of textfile writing from the 1980's BBS World. They have read about my site at such sites such as slashdot and Hotwired, and they've come seeking to reminisce about that long-ago time, or learn more about a culture that they might have heard about or never known. That's why I put this site up. Saddened to find an entire piece of my life had not made the translation to the Internet, I endeavored to bring back all the textfiles of my youth. These files were written by BBS users to show their own hubris, or find others like themselves, or just express themselves in a world that has never taken the opinions of the young all that seriously. My site now has over 19,000 textfiles online, and I am very proud of it. The other group of people have had this site linked via news organizations and individuals investigating or parodying the events in Littleton, Colorado, wherein teachers and students were murdered by gun and explosives-toting students who may or may not have called themselves "The Trenchcoat Mafia". In one particularly tasteless approach, a group has put up a parody site at the very findable web address www.trenchcoat.org that makes light of the deaths and purports to give instructions on joining the Trenchcoat Mafia by means of buying Trenchcoats from Van Heusen and otherwise arming themselves in preparation for further massacres. In the 1980's, people were told that people who used computers were dangerous folks. I don't mean computer hackers, I mean anyone who used computers. They were portrayed as weird, anti-social, potentially deranged, and otherwise not normal in the true sense of the word. This image was an easy one for news organizations to wrap their words around, to be able to find some sort of "good side" and "bad side" in a story, even if this wasn't really the case. The FBI, under pressure to find "The Bad Guy", have torn apart lives of good people trying to discern evil political or lawbreaking intentions that weren't ultimately there. I had thought those dark days were behind us, but they have the possibility of reappearing at any time. Now that computers are everywhere, and people have begun to consider them a necessity in their daily lives, it is generally understood that computer users and sites such as mine are not evil. But I fear the natural tendency of Americans and the government to find "The Bad Guy" in a situation like this, to blame movies or video games, or even my site, as being what caused the deaths in Colorado. The need to punish who caused it, especially in light of the suicides of the perpetrators, fills folks with anger. They want to ban, they want to legislate, they want to track down, they want to find something to burn and scream at, trying to come to grips with what has happened. My site was never about blowing things up. My site is about transcribing files that were written by teenagers in the 1980s that were posted on Bulletin Board Systems, teenagers who were filled with a sense of not being accepted, who were trying to fit in, who were trying to understand how the world could end up as screwed-up as they observed it to be. I have staked my place here to be one of the people who brings those words back to you. Some of these words are racist, homophobic, poorly spelled, and in many cases complete inside jokes meaningless except to the participants. That's the nature of communication. I don't condone these words; I just want people to have a record of those times, to remember where they came from, or learn where they did. Thank you for listening to me. Further Reading: Salon has written an article that captures my feelings Exactly.
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