Monday, May 10, 2004
Before there were pictures
At times I get sad that image hosting is not a part of the free Blogger service. Granted, part of that is because I'm quite cheap; I could pay for it, but I don't.
Then I have a moment when I think of textfiles.com, and I am reminded that the important things here are the words.
Textfiles.com is a fantastic site. It culls and categorizes all those ancient and magnificent threads that were passed around BBSs between the years of 1980-1995. This, of course, encompasses the period of time between when personal computers first came to homeowners and the birth of the internet as we know it today--in other words, this is what the internet was before there was an internet. It's no surprise that many of these textfiles are absolute classics that are still circulated in e-mail forwards today. Textfiles.com is the archive of the proto-internet soul, which was all words (even the pictures are made of letters)--and which finds itself, after some fashion, resurrected in new form in today's weblogs.
For those of you who can remember what life was like in those days, when Adventure was the video game we loved and when we played it on one of three types of monitors--those displaying green, white, or amber text on a black background--textfiles.com is going to feel like a treasure trove. Becaue that's exactly what it is. It would take days to go through all the files--that's why it'd be best to start browsing with the list of the 100 classic textfiles. That's like the Norton Anthology of textfile directories. The other directories all contain classic entries, and you can download whole directories. There's a lot there, too, as each directory may contain dozens of megabytes of text files. Repeat: dozens of megabytes of plain text (ASCII) files.
For anyone else, get used to the site's sparse presentation, and realize that the content's as lovely and timeless as some of those great black-and-white movies. These are the silent films of the digital age.
Then I have a moment when I think of textfiles.com, and I am reminded that the important things here are the words.
Textfiles.com is a fantastic site. It culls and categorizes all those ancient and magnificent threads that were passed around BBSs between the years of 1980-1995. This, of course, encompasses the period of time between when personal computers first came to homeowners and the birth of the internet as we know it today--in other words, this is what the internet was before there was an internet. It's no surprise that many of these textfiles are absolute classics that are still circulated in e-mail forwards today. Textfiles.com is the archive of the proto-internet soul, which was all words (even the pictures are made of letters)--and which finds itself, after some fashion, resurrected in new form in today's weblogs.
For those of you who can remember what life was like in those days, when Adventure was the video game we loved and when we played it on one of three types of monitors--those displaying green, white, or amber text on a black background--textfiles.com is going to feel like a treasure trove. Becaue that's exactly what it is. It would take days to go through all the files--that's why it'd be best to start browsing with the list of the 100 classic textfiles. That's like the Norton Anthology of textfile directories. The other directories all contain classic entries, and you can download whole directories. There's a lot there, too, as each directory may contain dozens of megabytes of text files. Repeat: dozens of megabytes of plain text (ASCII) files.
For anyone else, get used to the site's sparse presentation, and realize that the content's as lovely and timeless as some of those great black-and-white movies. These are the silent films of the digital age.
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