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textfiles.com
- HugoDaniel 6y agoLove the anarchy section: http://www.textfiles.com/anarchy/ http://www.textfiles.com/anarchy/
- qrbLPHiKpiux 6y agoRemember Jolly Rogers book?
- HugoDaniel 6y agoyes! what a jewel. i was hoping to find other classics here like the "how to disappear completely"
- qrbLPHiKpiux 6y agoI have that. I have to find it. When I do, I will pastebin the link here.
- qrbLPHiKpiux 6y agohttps://pastebin.com/bGAnfstT https://pastebin.com/bGAnfstT
- auxym 6y agoReminds me of Temple of the Screaming Electron. Spent lots of time reading text files on there as an early teen. Thankfully I didn't blow my face up/go to jail for terrorism.
- dannytatom 6y agoi miss that site, hella nostalgia just hearing the name.
- CPLX 6y agoThis contains the one of my all time favorite discoveries from the BBS days: http://cd.textfiles.com/group42/ANARCHY/COOKBOOK/BLOTBOX.HTM http://cd.textfiles.com/group42/ANARCHY/COOKBOOK/BLOTBOX.HTM Stuffing a pile of dot matrix printouts of this and similar stuff into a backpack and reading it on the school bus was pretty exciting stuff for 12 year old me and a few friends. The fact that is was mostly ludicrous or tongue-in-cheek for the writers was, of course, mostly lost on us at that age. Although the pay phone paperclip trick was real and sure was helpful for calling home after a day of skateboarding around empty parking garages.
- frogpelt 6y agoFirst thing I looked for was Jolly Roger's cookbook.
- wanderingjew 6y agoLooking forward to the Twitter commentary on this thread.
- londons_explore 6y agoHas the community of people who wrote documents like this just dried up and vanished? Or have they all moved somewhere underground I can't find?
- Scuds 6y agophrack writers went pro.
- CalRobert 6y agoSheer speculation, but I suspect some of them grew out of it over time and the communities fell below critical mass, and the conditions for new entrants to replace them weren't there. It was very much a product of the BBS world, and I have a hard time imagining stuff like this gaining traction now.
- caseyw 6y agoI was just talking to a friend about this. It seems like the old web is vanishing. I miss the random, often times horribly designed custom pages people used to setup. I hope we’re looking in the wrong place.
- anthk 6y agoCHeck Neocities.
- boomlinde 6y agoIt's there but I think it kind of gets lost as people lost interest in ad-hoc curation. If we arrive at a page today it's normally because some large entity with a commercial incentive brought us there via a search engine or a social network. Meanwhile, people no longer really host link pages or curate webrings. It feels like a bait and switch to me because search used to yield more interesting results, and social networks did relatively little to get you to buy something, but as their precision in achieving their commercial goals have increased that is no longer true.
- zozbot234 6y ago
- mhb 6y agoShouldn't have stolen the color scheme from jwz. Now we have two problems.
- corobo 6y agoGreen on black is a colour scheme from old terminals..
- codazoda 6y agoThis. The monitors of the time were called monochrome. Most of them came in green or amber.
- superasn 6y agoBut this site is super hard to read on mobile and really hurts your eyes. I get the nostalgia value but there should be a more usable version for the users just discovering it for the first time.
- zozbot234 6y ago> But this site is super hard to read on mobile Not sure if serious... just rotate the device into landscape. Or stick to old Apple][ / C=64 stuff.
- corobo 6y agoNot really related to my comment but for the record I agree, all sites should be responsive even if they don't look like modern websites. As for hurting your eyes.. that's user preference and this isn't my site. Try reader mode I guess?
- reitzensteinm 6y agoThe owner of the site gave a talk at DEFCON 17, "That Awesome Time I Was Sued For Two Billion Dollars" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSWqx8goqSY&ab_channel=Christiaan008 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSWqx8goqSY&ab_channel=Chris...
- TehCorwiz 6y agoI like that talk. Probably one of my favorites.
- hrdwdmrbl 6y agoThe owner is also a totally great guy
- redivysoft 6y agoYep, he took the time to answer questions from highschool me more than a decade ago and he was very friendly. I'm glad everyone else seems to have had positive interactions with him also.
- textfiles 6y agoLet's not assume everyone had a great time with me because that will fall apart very quickly. I appreciate when someone young or curious reaches out to me for context or questions because I did that throughout my life and I always appreciated when it was rewarded with a response. I try to be the person I always hoped was on the other side.
- 1996 6y agoStill, I like that spirit!
- EvanAnderson 6y agoAny Jason Scott talk is totally worth it. Irongeek, on YouTube, has Jason's DerbyCon talks archived (and likely some others too).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- CalRobert 6y agoAn important piece of the early internet. I remember when my brief submission made it to the last issue of HOE (Hogs of Ecstasy) and felt like a small celebrity.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoThis wasn’t even internet. Dial-up. Hardly anyone used TCP/IP or FTP or telnet ( only universities ). At home we all used software with protocols like XMODEM, YMODEM, and ZMODEM for file transfer. Everything else was plain ASCII over serial connections with modems between two devices.
- david_draco 6y agoA gif?! That would have been an opportunity to appropriately use the <blink> tag!
- dangoor 6y agoAlas(?), the blink tag is dead: https://caniuse.com/#search=blink https://caniuse.com/#search=blink
- dgellow 6y agoNo modern browser support <blink> as a tag. Though you can reproduce the effect using CSS animations or javascript. Some examples here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_element#Implementation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_element#Implementation
- schwartzworld 6y agowith WebComponents it's trivial to implement.
- aphrax 6y agoWhenever this site pops up I always end up going to http://textfiles.com/bbs/MINDVOX/voices.txt http://textfiles.com/bbs/MINDVOX/voices.txt - I recall Mindvox in Wired and that kind of thing but it was ever so slightly before my time..
- paraboul 6y agoReminds me of MadChat which was popular in France in the 90's. Closed in 2006 but looks like it was archived it here : http://ivanlef0u.fr/repo/madchat/ http://ivanlef0u.fr/repo/madchat/
- leetrout 6y agoI like the footer on one of the docs that apparently came from a BBS: Full access for first-time callers. We don't want to know who you are, where you live, or what your phone number is. We are not Big Brother.
- newsbinator 6y agohttp://www.textfiles.com/internet/acronyms.txt http://www.textfiles.com/internet/acronyms.txt Interesting which early internet acronyms survived and which dropped out of use. e.g. I haven't seen PMJI (Pardon My Jumping In) (at least not in a decade, if ever). Notable absences from the early days: IANAL / IANAD
- marcoperaza 6y ago>Congress shall encourage the practice of Judeo-Christian religion by its own public exercise there of, and shall make no laws abridging the freedom of responsible speech (unless such speech is in a digital form or contains material that is copyrighted, classified, proprietary or offensive to non-Europeans, non-males, differently abled or alternativley prefferenced persons), or the right of people to peaceably assemble (unless such assembly takes place on corporate or military property or within an electronic environment), or to petition the government for redress of grievances (unless such grievances relate to national security). http://www.textfiles.com/100/billrights.fun http://www.textfiles.com/100/billrights.fun
- codazoda 6y agoI have a box of 3.25" disks from my BBS days. I need to take a look at those and see if I can get any text files from them. This archive is an amazing glimpse at my youth.
- betamaxthetape 6y agoFrom the site: > If you've got some old disks that have files you never did anything with, please consider sending them or a copy of them to me. That stuff is precious; and it is rare; and it is finite. That's what matters. I'd suggest emailing him at jason@textfiles.com . He has the equipment to transfer most types of disk, and can also guide you through the process if you don't want to send the disks away.
- zozbot234 6y agoIt's also important to do this because old disks tend to lose their data over time. To the point where folks will take raw magnetic flux images from old media, just to have a higher chance of getting some data back.
- magerleagues 6y agoIf you're looking for gems on this site, just check the HN search results for it: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=textfiles.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=textfiles.com
- lowwave 6y agoHmmm, why doesn't the site have https?
- Kye 6y agoThis is the late 90s and https still takes too much CPU to justify for most purposes.
- forgotmypw16 6y agoNot every browser supports current https
- oneplane 6y agoI think the author had a spat on twitter a while back because of the same question. There really isn't any excuse to not have TLS on your site, even if purely to thwart MITM injection. Most arguments are BS but still keep popping up: - heavy on the CPU (not with anything after 2006) - hard to setup (not with LE + ACME) - I don't process information (that doesn't matter/is not the reason, DPI, MITM come to mind) - browsers can't handle it (lies, browsers handle it fine, unless you're using a browser from <2010) Better yet: even if the resource/browser stuff were relevant, you can still leave http up and add https as an option.
- csixty4 6y ago> unless you're using a browser from <2010 To be fair, a lot of Jason Scott's audience is people who might choose to use ancient browsers on obsolete platforms.
- oneplane 6y agoDoesn't that make it double-bad? Again, people might come up with the argument that it's their own problem if they get abused, but also that is just not the reality we live in; any compromised system can (and will most of the time) be used to infect/compromise/attack other systems.
- 6y ago
- mark_l_watson 6y agoWow, I love this. Clicked on “Where are to files?” and discovered a treasure trove. I just dived into food files. Although it is not the type of artificial intelligence work people usually pay me to do, my passion is knowledge representation and automatically extracting meaning from text. textfiles.com looks like a great resource. Thanks for posting this.
- teambayleaf 6y agohttp://www.textfiles.com/food/recipe.002 http://www.textfiles.com/food/recipe.002 This french soup recipe is a gem. I didn't know that I could use "3/4 cup of COCA COLA" to make onion soup.
- loco5niner 6y agoShockingly, here is the source of this recipe: "International Cooking with Coca-Cola", a give-away pamphlet from The Coca-Cola Company, 1981
- Mc91 6y agoReading Unix Use and Security From The Ground Up by The Prophet back in 1989 familiarized me with how to use Unix (anyone remember uucico?), launching my career into IT, initially as a Unix systems administrator (anyone remember when corporate IT racked their own servers?)
- unixhero 6y agoI learnt about coffee and how to brew it from the ancient coffeefaq.txt file, copied via sneakernet and usenet, back in the early 90s. The text is totally valuable, and of course still valid. It has found its permanent home on text files.com, and that is so great. http://cd.textfiles.com/group42/FAQS/ACAFFEIN.TXT http://cd.textfiles.com/group42/FAQS/ACAFFEIN.TXT
- earthboundkid 6y ago> Fact: Unless you are buying some major debris, bean quality is not very important That doesn't reflect my experience. If you buy fancy single origin beans, the taste varies wildly from region to region. I think within a region the taste differences mostly come down to roasting, but an Ethiopian and Kenyan coffee aren't going to taste the same at all. To me the best quickie coffee explainer I've seen is https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52d4cb70e4b0ba94ab0aea30/t/5a46b9740d92977993ce6582/1514584438778/MCM3_manual_004.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52d4cb70e4b0ba94ab0ae... . The coffee control diagram is basically everything you need to tell a new wannabe coffee snob.
- artimaeis 6y agoFull quote: > Fact: Unless you are buying some major debris, bean quality is not very important, as compared to 1-3 and 5. I’d wager that it doesn’t matter how nice your beans are, if they were roasted a long time ago, ground a long time ago, and brewed with unclean equipment and poor quality water the bean quality matters not at all. Even then, the file explains: > Fact: The prepackaged stuff you buy in supermarkets is major debris, (in general). So if you are using supermarket coffee, you can at least grind it yourself and try to use decent water.
- jjice 6y agoWater is a huge factor that I neglected for a while. It finally hit me once someone told me that coffee is mostly water, and your coffee is only as good as your water. Makes complete sense, but I had never thought about it. A simple Britta filter goes a long way.
- tomcooks 6y ago> blinkenlights right in the feels.
- qppo 6y agoMan AIDS was scary in the 90s. Fun to see the same conspiracy theories come back for Covid.
- buttercakes 6y agoFor those who remember or interested, there is a similar site that catalogs the ANSI BBS art scene at http://sixteencolors.net/ http://sixteencolors.net/
- textfiles 6y agoAll are welcome, enjoy the site.
- neovive 6y agoThis is amazing! So much nostalgia looking at the BBS List.
- the137 6y agoOne of the few sites that I'll always remember discovering. Around a decade ago i wandered over in the middle of the night. Almost in awe I was there until the sun came up.
- nmc 6y agoFYI, your webserver sets the ContentType header based on the file extension, which is probably not what you want. For example: http://textfiles.com/100/black.box http://textfiles.com/100/black.box gave me "application/vnd.previewsystems.box".
- js2 6y agoFrom http://www.textfiles.com/apple/iigsprob.hum http://www.textfiles.com/apple/iigsprob.hum > It can hardly be beleived that Apple would put out an overpriced product that works halfway and not be willing to fix it or at least offer our money back. Ha, just you wait. (Former IIGS owner, owner of many Apple devices before and since.)
- londons_explore 6y agoCould we have this over https? My internet connection blocks most pages of the site as "Adult content", presumably because it has bomb making instructions on, and the UK government is tetchy about that kind of thing nowadays.
- wiradikusuma 6y agoMy provider puts ads on non-https -_-
- mcpherrinm 6y agoThere are some mirrors linked on the site, some of which have https Eg https://textfiles.meulie.net/ https://textfiles.meulie.net/
- macintux 6y agoUse https://archive.org/ https://archive.org/ ?
- saagarjha 6y agoIf you are an adult, why would your internet connection have any reason to block it?
- lwb 6y agoWhether it should is not the same as whether it does
- londons_explore 6y agoIt did make me find the login and turn the parental controls from "nanny state mode" to "just spy on me and arrest me if I click too many of the wrong links mode".
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y agoI always loved this story of his: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1127 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1127 For some reason, the original is gone. That's his sequel.
- msla 6y agoNot gone, he just needs to fix his blog so it redirects old links correctly. I tracked down the links to the saga: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22997724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22997724
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y agoAwesome! Thanks!
- Scuds 6y agoThe ones that are formatted to 40 columns in all caps because THATS WHAT THE ORIGINAL APPLE II COULD DO are charming to no end. http://www.textfiles.com/apple/wiztips4.txt http://www.textfiles.com/apple/wiztips4.txt I wish I was five years older and to have experienced the Apple II bbs era instead of getting an old hand me down //c in the early 90's and not having the cash for a modem.
- shon 6y agoAll hail Jason Scott. As may have said, this guy has brought so much joy by preserving and highlighting all of this content. I've known Jason for years from the old scene and was one of the old school original (uberspace) textfiles mirrors, which was hosted on a modified Cobalt Cube running NetBSD from my 22nd story apartment (Golden Gate Apartments) in SF, which at the time, happened to include free internet on a full T1 back in 2002! @textfiles, thank you for continuing to bring joy to the world. Personally I've most recently enjoyed your MAME archives as I'be been building Retropie boxes from Arcade1Up cabs to play the classics with my daughter. Thanks for all you do.
- textfiles 6y agofinger guns
- stakkur 6y agoI got my first 'email' address in the mid-80s, on CompuServe. I remember this era. I wish I could transport all my younger friends to those days. They seemed more...humane, and mysterious. There was an optimism and exhilaration about computers that seems all but snuffed out. And Jason Scott is a saint.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoThis is a good one, "Anatomy of a pirate": http://textfiles.com/piracy/anatomy.txt http://textfiles.com/piracy/anatomy.txt
- kleiba 6y agoWhile we're at it: @textfiles, any more awesome documentaries in the pipeline?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 6y agolegendary, often posted content/site - newsworthy right now for any reason OP?
- movedx 6y ago"How not to be boring" - http://www.textfiles.com/fun/boring.txt http://www.textfiles.com/fun/boring.txt Love it. My wife gestures all the time. I'm going to show her how boring it is based on an ASCII document from the 90s :-P
- yosito 6y agoVery cool. I recently got into ASCII art while building myself a new portfolio website. I decorated my resume with ASCII art, and even created ASCII art of the International Space Station, among others. https://iamlocaljo.com/experience/ https://iamlocaljo.com/experience/