It's baffingly hard to quantify how many people he (and all the other great people at the Internet Archive) has affected with his bullheaded conservation efforts.
He says in the second article you link that he doesn’t think hotlinking is bad per se, especially when it’s done in support of knowledge and education.
I think the moral is rather that hotlinking is dangerous.
I remember reading these over ten years ago; probably posted on Slashdot back when that place had only started its nosedive. Still pretty funny ~15 years later.
Let'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.
All 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.
I 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.
> 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.
> 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.
Water 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.
I have very low standards for coffee, use Starbucks bulk beans off of Amazon, and brew it in an automatic mill+drip machine. But a Brita filter for the water makes a world of difference.
I liked the water in Toyama, but they had a PR campaign to brand it as “oishii mizu” so people would forget about the cadmium poisoning in the Showa years. The PR campaign worked on me. :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itai-itai_disease
Tap water quality is very variable. In many parts of Florida for instance, tap water tastes and smells like burnt matches; tons of sulfur in that water. It's still safe to drink, but I expect people living in regions with tap water like that would get better results with bottled or filtered water.
Right, that's perfectly understandable, I'm just wondering if people think good quality tap water needs to be filtered too, e.g. maybe minerals affect extraction.
I'm not a water snob or chemist but I've been around.
What qualifies tap as "good" is highly subjective but on the one hand you have places like Florida where the tap is desalinated and tastes like farm runoff, and then you have places like Southern California where the mineral content/hardness of the water itself makes it taste like soapy bathwater. I've even noticed it vary within the same municipality-- in two apartments I rented in Atlanta, one mile apart, one had tap that tasted fine, the other (near a swamp) tasted like sewage (we were convinced groundwater was seeping into the water main).
In cases of hard water, the brewing process seems to serve as its own distillery that separates minerals from the water. The resulting water/coffee tastes fine to me but you'll find all sorts of mineral buildup clogging your coffee maker if it doesn't have its own filtration system (my Cuisinart has a filter-on-a-stick that lowers into the water tank).
Nothing seems to make Florida water palatable though. That taste passes straight through into the coffee, like burned urine. Use distilled.
What does that even mean "debris" in this context? I tried to google "major debris" and it only returned this text. Why would I deliberately buy stuff with a bunch of junk in it?
I have a filter but I intentionally use tap water because I don't want to get used to filtered. I know that most coffee I drink outside of home will be with tap water so I don't want to spoil myself.
I have not had that problem with fussy coffee in general. When I'm home, I drink my coffee and enjoy the taste. When I'm out, I get enough caffeine to make it through the day and that's enough.
Sommeliers claim to have incredible wine tasting powers, yet in a blind taste test I cannot reliably distinguish red wine from white wine. Maybe with more training I could, but shouldn't the difference be obvious without training?
I've yet to be convinced that subtly in wine and coffee flavor is an objective matter.
There are definitely things that I consider voodoo, like wetting the filter before you make your coffee, but there are tons of things that are just undeniable like: if you drink coffee from stale beans, your urine smells bad then next time you pee; if not, not. I'm always surprised when I drink some gas station coffee and then a couple of hours later "oh yeah, I normally drink better coffee, don't I?"
It's not voodoo; the concept of "supertasters" and other supersensory traits in humans is well-documented. Most legitimate sommeliers are likely supertasters.
I'm a supertaster myself-- certain pungent/sour tastes will literally make me gag; I don't like foods with a million different components since I can taste all of them quite clearly. My wife on the other hand will smell things on the wind (like smoke) that I'll only notice 5-10 minutes later. I hear there are others who can see gradients of colors that others cannot.
> wetting the filter before you make your coffee
This isn't really voodoo, but it is debatable whether it matters for such a low volume. Since no filter fully expresses the fluid it absorbs, if you put exactly 4 cups of water through a dry filter, you're not getting exactly 4 cups of water out of it. The result might be a stronger cup of coffee (since there is less water to dilute it). Wetting the filter gives you a more "accurate" result, but you'll get a consistent cup of coffee either way if you commit to either always wetting it or not doing so.
This matters more for things like oil changes, which is why after changing your oil filter and refilling the oil, you're supposed to run the car for a few minutes to operating temperature and check the oil levels again-- the dry filter will have added to the total capacity of the engine block and soaked up some of what you thought you put in.
> Wetting the filter gives you a more "accurate" result, but you'll get a consistent cup of coffee either way if you commit to either always wetting it or not doing so.
The big difference that wetting a filter has is that certain filters have a slight taste associated with them. If you wet the filter first and throw that water away you get a cleaner/brighter cup without the paper filter adulterants.
I can definitely taste the difference between slowly pouring over and not, but so far I have not been able to taste the pre-wet filter. I’d prefer not to gain the ability either because there’s only so much time in the morning.
One 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.
Wow, 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.
They grew up. And the internet of books became the internet of videos.
They're out there writing technical manuals, exising in middle age and earning money.
Back in those days a place like textiles would be an aggregator on a fairly small internet. Most of those content types can be found with their own larger more focused niche sites.
You can't get more focused than textfiles. This is an online museum about a specific aspect of internet lore and history. Jason Scott is an archivist/historian.
Is it growing up? For me it’s more that everyone reads books like „How to brand yourself on the internet“ that’s why there is no personality left... the same goes for quirky software there is not much coming because everyone writes a sideproject notetaking electron app because it’s something everyone wants and can relate too. The problem with the modern web is not growing up it is the loss of personality.
The one's from 80's and 90's just grew up and dot-com era really gave more opportunities for the creative programmers. Younger people will never write on many of the topics in these files because it will land you in jail FAST. It used to be more anonymity back then. Phreaking, warez scenes were alive and well. Heck, even demoscence is not the same anymore.
Anyways if you are into coding/hacking, working for a startup is where to channel your creative energy.
There was also a lot of motivation to phreak and trade warez due to a lack of things we'd simply take for granted nowadays, such as always-on connectivity and a widespread free-software and free-culture scene.
It's a lot harder to explain the whole "anarchy" obsession that shows up in the files, though. Maybe that kind of loser attitude would make you "cool" and "a tough guy" back in the 1980s and the 1990s. Or at least that's what the file authors thought.
You're looking back at those anarchist leanings through two decades' worth of post-9/11 pro-nanny-state propaganda. And in some cases those writings predate the fall of the Soviet Union.
The world was a different place back then. I was 7 in August of 91, too young to remember or have experienced much of the world but I do remember the culture of pre-9/11 internet being starkly different from that of today.
> And in some cases those writings predate the fall of the Soviet Union.
That would explain some things, then. Indeed, those writings have a lot more in common with the pre-Soviet "nihilist" movement than anything relating to anarchism as it would be understood today.
I wrote some of those anarchist files in the 80s, but most of them came from The Anarchist’s Cookbook. Look it up, you can still buy used copies.
That attitude was indeed cool and definitely not loser back then. It was “anti-The-Man”, much like the Anonymous movement whenever that was... 10 years ago?
> It's a lot harder to explain the whole "anarchy" obsession that shows up in the files, though. Maybe that kind of loser attitude would make you "cool" and "a tough guy" back in the 1980s and the 1990s.
It's a sign of the times. The mid-to-late 1980s saw a very conservative shift in politics that continued into the 90s-00s.
Once the whole "anarchy" thing started manifesting in real ways (numerous domestic shootings/bombings) by the mid-90s it was pretty dangerous to be associated with.
Minority ideologies always get painted as their villains by the majority who wants them to go away. Communism is bad because Stalin is bad. Anarchy is bad because the unibomber is bad.
There is a version of communism that says that people should live in a local community that helps people who need it. As long as someone who doesn't want to live that way has the reasonable option to leave, this is actually pretty hard to object to.
There is a version of anarchy that says that all laws and taxes should be at the local level and furthermore that some localities might then choose not to have any, or only the most basic ones like a prohibition on violence. It's almost the same thing -- pretty hard to object to when people have the option to exit.
What they have in common is that they can't exist when you have a central government de facto prohibiting them. There might be some real efficiencies in a commune that has its own doctors, but that doesn't really work if everybody there still has to pay twice the cost of their own community's doctors in Medicare taxes. You can't have much of an anarchist collective if the feds are still arresting anybody who tries to sell pot brownies or break DRM so they can repair their own tractor.
So people have been looking for ways to shed the yoke of central power for a long time. The US was practically founded on it, both in terms of why the revolution was fought and how the constitution was laid out, but the forces of centralization have been hacking away at those foundations and doing what they can to destroy the "laboratories of democracy" of Brandeis for a long time now.
Is it really that surprising that people were excited about a then-emerging opportunity to potentially take some of it back?
The unibomber was an anarchist, therefore anarchists are bad, you don't see how that works? It's like how environmentalism is bad because of eco-terrorism and encryption is bad because Mark Zuckerberg is a jerk who has too much money and all Muslims are bad because of 9/11.
80's and 90's it was mainly about pushing the limits of hardware (and some art). Now the demos don't look as innovative comparing to games, VFX. I think only C64 and some other artificially limited platforms still are doing very interesting stuff but it's very little of it.
I 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.
It'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.
Search used to rely on formalized 'ad-hoc' curation in the form of DMOZ and other web directories. Without it, SEO has become the main influence on results and search-engines are now heavily focusing on novelty and recency in the hope of turning up something that the user was actually looking for. Of course 'novelty' is the polar opposite of something like textfiles, or of many well-established online resources.
While links have in the past been used to rank webpages, it isn't strictly necessary. You could have billions of documents and still figure out which one answers a question simply with a good ML model looking at the text of the documents alone.
I really enjoy sites that have extremely long linkrolls on them, but they tend to always be static linkrolls of the homepages of sites or blogs rather than pointing at specific high quality posts or areas of those sites. Sites that have a 'cool links I was looking at last month'-esque Link section are very interesting though. Alexey Guzey's site[0] is a good example of this kind of thing.
It feels like that, but I think the world has just become more complicated and the signal/noise ratio is different and the publishing avenues and methods are much more dispersed. Back in the BBS/Usenet days if you wanted to write a FAQ or doc on a specific topic you typically did it in one of the very few places (text file, FidoNet, usenet). Now you can create a video on Youtube, post on a major social network (Facebook group, subreddit, topic-specific forum, etc.), create your own webpage, etc.
As someone who grew up in the BBS era I am often nostalgic for it because everything felt a lot easier to grasp and much more simple, but in truth the amount of information out there and easy to access is many orders of magnitude higher these days.
"Telehack is a simulation of a stylized arpanet/usenet, circa 1985-1990. It is a full multi-user simulation, including 25,000 hosts and BBS's from the early net, thousands of files from the era, a collection of adventure and IF games, a working BASIC interpreter with a library of programs to run, simulated historical users, and more.*
"You can telnet directly to Telehack on the regular telnet port of 23.
Funny, yesterday I was there, I was curious about playing Vicious Cycles over telnet and some BSD 4.3 machine under Simh (yes, I have it under OpenBSD and Frotz too, but I was just having fun :) ).
In the 1980s we had fantastic Internet connectivity and bandwidth at SAIC but most stuff was on FTP sites. I spent at least an hour a week curating lists of FTP sites and directory listings of them. I was sort-of a human search engine and would help people find useful stuff. Then the text-based www happened, then Mozilla happened, and things exponentially got more awesome. We had a smart young guy, Greg Hannah, who set up web servers for us on just about day zero of the web.
DejaNews (bought by Google and reskinned as Google Groups) showed up in the 90s and made everyone realize that everything we wrote would be searchable forever. Trumpet Winsock scripts made it possible to offer Internet access and BBSes faded out. Gopher was powered by indexed textfiles, but hosting on the Internet was very traceable back then, and often at a university where tolerances for anarchism were low. Geocities picked up the “post text files” banner for a while but eventually collapsed as blogs and web forums took up the writing output of most.
Well, first they moved from BBSes (and Usenet, I guess) to personal websites, then internet forums and the blogosphere.
Somewhere along the road the medium changed partly from text to video, this was initially surprising to me, but on the whole isn't particularly important.
Then Reddit ate the forums, and I'm not sure what happened to the blogs, but they don't feel the same either.
So they got spread out, got sold out, and overshadowed by louder people doing the same except with ads and for money.
I totally skipped over some bits of Internet history, but the point is, it used to be more open. Maybe harder to use and smaller. But it wasn't all being funded by gigantic ad corporations. Because the platforms they provide may technically seem capable of providing the same ground as for textfiles, they're also continuously pushing on their users to behave in certain ways to optimize advertising profits. And that kind of sucks the life out of everything, it seems.
So I started and maintained a text BASIC programming fanzine back in 1994-1996 and.. I'm still in the business producing weekly newsletters for programmers 25 years later, except now it's my job! :-)
A fair amount of my old stuff if there on the site. I was surprised to see it all again. Anyway, it shouldn't be a surprise that since then, my life has been in and around InfoSec pretty much exclusively.
Sheer 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.
There's some stuff I wrote on there. I really should send Jason some of the 1993-95 stuff that saw limited release on only a couple of BBS's. Things were strange right there at the sunset of the BBS era...
If we're just talking people writing articles for an audience and not a discussion board, I would say a lot of that has moved over to Youtube. Video essays are incredibly popular right now.
On the discussions side of things, there are actually decent independent forums still hanging around. They are usually hobby-oriented or for cars (shoutout to any fitfreaks) but they are pretty good quality.
>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).
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.
I 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.
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.
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.
It 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".
Whenever this site pops up I always end up going to 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..
An 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.
This 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.
Reading 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?)
> 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.)
> 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.
It'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.
Very 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/
I 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.
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.
Well, getting an RCE on that wouldn't be that hard I imagine. Not a whole lot of protections in there, and if there is an OS between the browser and the metal you can exploit that too.
And if you don't want to exploit the browser or the hardware, you can still simply inject a self-refreshing iframe in to the plain text html stream and have that z80 act like a (slow) proxy so you can do things that will point to that Z80 being the 'origin'.
Everybody assumes that 'simpler' or 'reduced' systems are always safer, but as soon as you deal with external interfaces and the outside world, that goes out the window. Lynx was thought to have less of an attack surface because it just did basic text-based browsing with HTML and not much else. Turns out that wasn't the case either.
Well, then you use progressive rendering, or you use chunks, or you use something else. Sure, there might be specific mitigations that someone might have or have not set up, but that is not the point. The point is that assuming your system is safe is a bad position, and ignoring easy to use systems and processes to thwart complete classes of abuse is bad when you use a shared medium like the internet.
>I think the author had a spat on twitter a while back because of the same question.
Ok, I guess that explains downvote to my post. I was just wondering. Cause now we can get free SSL with let's encrypt. And since traffic and be hijacked and modified, it just seems to make sense to have a site that serves text files to have ssl.
No there aren't. All HTTP traffic can be modified, which means it can deliver any malicious payload to the server or client. It's dangerous not to use HTTPS, period.
This is silly, as the endpoint you're connecting to could also be malicious. If you're worried about trusting your intermediary, you can just VPN to a trusted host and use it as a proxy.
Or you can SSH to the server and read it from http://localhost (if you have access). But there can still be malicious software running, intercepting syscalls or your localhost domain can point to a malicious IP. :/ Software can't be trusted. Period.
Are you for real? This website has been around and has looked more or less the same since the late 90s. The claim that jwz invented the green and black color scheme is probably the strangest thing I’ll read all day.
It's a reference to jwz's saying "some people, when they have a problem think 'I know, I'll solve it with regular expressions!'. Now they have two problems" (not an exact quote).
The user posting this makes me think the whole post was a joke ;)
But 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.
That fact may cause sites like archive.org to pass over some of the content. Ergo we need to make a P2P mirror of the content. A ZeroNet port seems about right for a site with hundreds of pages and close to 58K textfiles.
Reading that takes me back to the mid-80s, when I encountered a port of emacs for the Amiga and I was just bewildered by it - in the age of GUIs, something developed before microcomputers and mice seemed like an pointless atavism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSWqx8goqSY&ab_channel=Chris...