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<P>
<B>More frequent updates occur at my weblog,
<A HREF="http://ascii.textfiles.com">ASCII.TEXTFILES.COM</A>.
<P>
<B>December 6, 2003</B><P>
Let me revise the statement in the previous news entry. Instead of "every
few months", it's rapidly become "every few years" that the news file is
updated.
<P>
Most of the reason for this is very good. The website is stable, with
files coming in regularly, fitting into the right slots and the best
directories, with little need for new ones to be created. Additional
files that aren't 1980's era textfiles are being given new sites to go
to, and I've done my best to have a solid selection of mirrors out
there that provide good connections to different parts of the world.
<P>
But the rest is mostly because of the <A HREF="http://www.bbsdocumentary.com">BBS
Documentary</A> I've been working on for two years, interviewing hundreds of people
about the experience of using the BBS. As you might expect, it's frigging huge,
especially when you cast the net as wide as I have.
<P>
I'm updating news right now to let you know that the front of the
textfiles.com, the title page, now is combined with the "mirror page"
and the "other sites I run page" so that all the mirrors get a copy
equally, instead of it all being dependent on one box. The thing doesn't
have the exact slick look the original page did, but it's pretty good and
does a lot more work in less space, so that's important.
<P>
Also, the links are now more prominent to the dozen or so related textfiles.com
sites, which include <A HREF="http://pdf.textfiles.com">pdf.textfiles.com</A> and
<A HREF="http://audio.textfiles.com">audio.textfiles.com</A>, and the massively
growing <A HREF="http://artscene.textfiles.com">artscene.textfiles.com</A>.
<P>
So, I'm healthy, happy, and working hard. Salut.
<P>
<B>January 15, 2001</B><P>
It appears that it is my style to update the news only every few months.
Well, technically, a historical archive isn't supposed to have earth
shattering events every other day, so I guess that's just the way it is.
On the other hand, I'm doing hours of work a day for a site, so it's not
like you're not seeing the results of my efforts.
<P>
I never expected to still be in the "collecting" phase of this site for
this long. Shows you how little I knew about just how many files were
out there waiting for me to collect. I've written a number of additional
utilities that will make tracking down doubles a much quicker and accurate
task. Just this past weekend, for example, I found FIVE THOUSAND doubled
files in the inbox that I won't have to compare to find elsewhere. That's
some good timesaving going on.
<P>
We're peeking a little above thirty thousand textfiles, but that's not
as meaningful as it was for the first twenty thousand, because I'm now
bringing in a ton of e-zines (mid 1990's-era textfile collections) and
I've acquired large swaths like the entire run of Fidonet FIDONEWS from
1984 to 2000. It's hardly fair to look at those hundreds of files and
act like they were acquired with the same care and luck as some of the
real buried classics in the hacking or bbs sections. However, they ARE
vital history, showing a very clear progression of BBSes from the mid
1980's heyday straight up to the present; only a few other online
collections can demonstrate that far a reach.
<P>
Added a new <A HREF="http://www.textfiles.com/thoughts/anarchy.html">essay
on the concept of "Anarchy"</A> as it relates to BBSes and the political
world. It was suggested to me by a user and I'm a better person for
writing it.
<P>
By the way, for the small amount of people looking for T-shirts or CDs
for sale, the fact is, I can NEVER offer them. The reasons are purely
legal; I lose money on this site (hundreds of dollars a month) and if
I start turning a PROFIT on them, then I'm in a much worse situation
should someone sue me for copyright infringement or libel or something
else. It's one thing to screw up; it's another thing to be raking in the
cash over that "screw up".
<P>
Other than that, things are steady as she goes. There will be new companion
sites added to this one, but they're just to handle natural offshoots of
the pure text collection, such as photographs of the BBS era and textfiles
for the year 2000 and beyond. You know, context.
<P>
Thanks for reading.
<P>
<B>October 1, 2000</B><P>
I apologize for the lack of updates. I switched jobs and got wrapped
up in a number of projects, so I didn't go bazoo on the site other than
to make sure it was working properly at all times. <P>
HOPE 2000 went really well and I met a number of my mirror administrators.
All the finest of human beings, I assure you. At DEFCON, I got to give
another great speech, and really enjoyed myself. I don't think I'll be
speaking again (how many more years would I want to milk this into
speeches?) But I'll very likely keep going, because it's fun. <P>
I'll be moving back into updating the site for the next couple of
months. Expect us to hit 30,000 files in that time. <P>
<B>June 12, 2000</B><P>
I have another speaking engagement at this year's
<A HREF="http://www.defcon.com">DEFCON</A>; hopefully this one will go as
well as last year's did. I think I'll get away from speaking after that;
the whole environment is too rife for trouble. I do want to get the
word out; maybe I'll speak at events other than hacker conventions. But
regardless. I appreciate the forum that Dark Tangent and the DEFCON
organizers provide for me. And I'll try to make this year's talk as
entertaining. <P>
We're now at about 23,000 textfiles. There's a new section called
<A HREF="http://www.textfiles.com/games">Games</A> which arose because
the "Arcade" section was just for arcade games without any mention
of home video games/consoles. Now they're both mentioned. The section
already has something like 400 files in it. <P>
I'm still in the process of pumping through the thousands of files in my
inbox. It used to be something like 80,000 and now it's about 30,000.
In case you're wondering, there's a ton of doubles. It is not necessary
to send me every issue of Phrack. I'm all set! <P>
The <A HREF="http://www.textfiles.com/magazines">magazines</A> section
is in bad shape and needs a real overhaul. When I went to 2.0, I simply
couldn't go through all of it. This will change. Mogel is helping me,
both with that, and with the
<A HREF="http://scene.textfiles.com">scene.textfiles.com</A> site, which
he runs and is very, very successful. <P>
Oh, and I will be attending HOPE 2000, although I will not be speaking.
See you there.<P>
<B>February 2, 2000</B><P>
Welcome to TEXTFILES.COM Version 2.0! It's taken me many more months
than I would have expected to finish this revision, but there was a ton
of stuff to put in, and I wanted to get it right. <P>
First of all, version 2.0 is Lynx Compatible! That means that the world's
most popular text-based web browser can now read the site as well as Netscape
or other similar graphical browsers. It seemed personally offensive that
I was harkening back to the days of text-only BBSes and you couldn't look
at the files without wading through graphics and special tables. So feel
free to browse this place in a text window, and really keep the faith. <P>
TEXTFILES.COM now weighs in a hefty and considerable 20,000 textfiles of
all subjects and sizes, ranging from a few key bytes to well over a couple
megabytes. I still have over 80,000 (!!!) textfiles left to sort through
but you should start to see a lot of completeness on some key subjects.
It would be pleasure beyond imagining for me to know that people are
using this site to learn about a time they didn't live through themselves,
or to use as study materials in writing reports or stories of their own.
Let me know if you are. If you lived through this time and you see what
you consider to be very important files missing, please let me know
about them, and I'll keep an eye out for them. <P>
Anyway, some other new improvements to the site:
Many, many doubled and broken files have been removed, a lot of spelling
errors (though not all) have been removed from the descriptions and
introductions, and you'll see that I've added some sections and removed
a few others. The largest new section to join is the <A HREF="../piracy.html">
Piracy</A> section, which has a very large amount of files related to
the (mostly) PC Pirating subculture. Very informative, very helpful.
There's also <A HREF="../conspiracy.html">conspiracy</A> and
<A HREF="../survival.html">survivalist</A> sections, because lots of files came that
way. Almost every main section has new subsections, as well. I tried to make it
so that there were no more than a few hundred files in any given directory, so
you aren't spending so much time wading through the table redrawing and
getting right to the files. <P>
A new disclaimer has been added, which clarifies the position of the site as
relates to copyright law, and you can also buy T-shirts!<P>
Oh, and another thing. There's a new <A HREF="../history.html">history</A> section
which will have essays and writings by people who were a part of the BBS world
of the 1980's, and who will give perspective on everything.
<P>
Isn't life great?<P>
<B>November 12, 1999</B><P>
What's been up for the past two months? Quite a bit, actually. I'm
now trying to take textfiles.com to version "2.0". Once it hits
version 2.0, I'll re-publicize it, and we'll see a large amount of
people using it (at least, I hope), and a whole new group of
folks will like the place, and maybe send more great files and
essays.
<P>
The new sections include a rebuffed Piracy section (replacing
the TAGS section), two more questions on the front page, and lots
and lots and lots of new sub-directories. I've been going through
all the current sections and cleaning out doubles, cleaning out
files that were in the wrong place and doubled that way, and
improving spelling, grammar, and all that sort of stuff.
<P>
In other words, I've been busy. I really have.
<P>
As of this writing, I'm in the HAMRADIO section, and going
down alphabetically. I hope to have this soon; my mirrors are
chomping at the bit to have the new version of the site. So am I.
<P>
<B>September 13, 1999</B><P>
My birthday. I'm 29. Since I started using computers when I was 9 and
started using BBSes when I was 11, that brings me to 20 years with
computers and 18 with textfiles. It's amazing how the time gets behind
you.
<P>
Once nice aspect to having been with textfiles so long is that
you really get a nice perspective and distance on them. I'm still
slogging through the inbox, currently consisting of two textfile
CDs I got last year, which gave no mind to putting 1995 graphics
programs next to <A HREF="http://www.textfiles.com/humor/REAL/squid.hum">Nearly
inscrutable BBS Scene Guides</A>. This is a lot of tedious, boring
work, as many of these files are either doubles, or worse, one
or two character differences from files already online, screwing up
my comparison routines. I used to tell people that I had 40,000
textfiles in the hopper. In fact, the number could be somewhat less or
somewhat GREATER than that; there's no way to tell, because a lot
of those files are in .zip format and I haven't split them apart
to see the candy-coated shell inside.
<P>
T-Shirts will become a reality in October. Additionally, I may be
switching jobs and if so, things are going to get whacky for a
while. Wish me luck.
<P>
Other odds and ends: Currently, the TAGS and MAGAZINES sections of
the site are in bad disarray, as I've been trying to get files up there
faster than making sure all the directories were pretty and sorted.
I'll blow a day on those sections soon. Thanks for understanding.
<P>
<B>August 13, 1999</B><P>
I hope that I've not given the impression of inaction by not
updating the news for textfiles.com in the last couple of months.
The fact is, the site has been undergoing major revision and
has many new changes. A lot of these are added sections such
as the <a href="../media.html">Media</A> and <A HREF="../conspiracy.html">conspiracy</A>
directories, and the additional information home pages such
as the <A HREF="http://www.textfiles.com/filestats.html">File Statistics</A>
page, which is updated nightly. This last is interesting because
it enables people to see the amount of files I'm pouring into the
place. I wish it could be faster, but at the moment I've added a few
thousand files since the news was last written. The amount of files
in my "in-box" is still hovering around 40,000, though, so there's
a lot of work to go.
<P>
Besides the wholesale cataloging of files, which is a heck of a job
in itself, I have other grand plans for the site, mostly in having
tours that introduce you to some aspect of the sub-culture. I'll write
an example one soon, I hope.
<P>
The other big hullaballo of the past few months was my speech at DEFCON
in Las Vegas on July 9th-11th. To my surprised, over a thousand people
heard me speak, and they even got some entertainment from it. I hope to
speak more about textfiles in the future, and I made a lot of acquaintances
at DEFCON who have been sending me more files and encouragement. And work
continues.
<P>
<B>June 5, 1999</B><P>
The mirroring of textfiles.com has come along nicely; we now have
4 sites. Synchronization will be a problem, but that's at least one
of those problems that just means a slight difference between sites,
as opposed to complete lack of access to the work, which would be
really bad.
<P>
I also just adjusted/fixed up the 100 and apple sections, which are
now really starting to become what I intended them to become. Nice.
Speaking at Defcon just next month; got my tickets and everything.
<P>
<B>April 24, 1999</B><P>
Unexpectedly, textfiles.com was mentioned in a satire page about the
massacre in Colorado, www.trenchcoat.org. Within a few hours, I was
getting thousands of hits in the Anarchy section, with people being
told this was where to get information on making explosives. This isn't
the case; this is the place to get badly-written and researched plans
for how people thought explosives should be created, often transcribed
from some book like The Anarchists' Cookbook or a Kurt Saxon book.
I see a difference there; maybe some don't, but I do.
<P>
Anyway, I got a very large amount of hate mail from people, including
some interesting questions about if I was a member of the Trenchcoat
Mafia or assuming I had created the parody page (which I did not).
Fearing some sort of government repraisal that would mean the loss
of my job, I put up a statement discussing what Anarchy Textfiles
meant to me, and why I thought they were an important part of history
in place of the index of files in the explosives directory, where
we were linked from trenchcoat.org.
<P>
This all got me thinking about how textfiles.com is currently set up,
off one of my machines running at my workplace. It's rather stupid
that outside folks can make me worried about the longevity of the site
simply by linking on it, so two important things are happening.
<P>
<B>1. I am moving.</B> TEXTFILES.COM will be going to another site to
live. There should be absolutely no downtime. The site is just as fast
and the PC in question is even faster than my current one, so it's not
like I'm going to be sacrificing speed or ease of use for my own peace
of mind. This new site costs me money, however, which brings me to my
second change:
<P>
<B>2. I am going to Version 1.0.</B> The reason for wanting to do this
is that I can then offer CDs to people at a price with the entire site
on it, that they can then read from instead of being stuck online all
the time. This will make life much easier for all of us. So, instead of
trying to integrate as many new files as I can, I will spend the next
week or so trying to clean up all the directories, move things into
the right sub-directories, make the introduction paragraphs more
descriptive of the directories they introduce, and generally tighten
the whole place up.
<P>
So although it's a bummer that it took such weird events for me to move
textfiles.com to the next level, and it will be costing me a lot more to
run, I think all around it was inevitable. The site will go on without
me being worried about company policy or federal agents coming to kill
me and whatnot.
<P>
If the idea of a textfiles.com T-shirt interests you, mail me.
<P>
<B>April 10, 1999</B><P>
One complaint/bother that a good amount of people mentioned to me was that
in most modern browsers on the Windows platform, clicking on any file with
a ".DOC" extension automatically makes that file open up in Microsoft Word.
I agree that this is totally unwarranted, so I've written a script that goes
through and renames every ".doc" file to ".txt". In the future, I will
rewrite the program so that it will instead take every .txt file and rename
it to the extension du jour of that particular directory, but for now,
this makes life easier for a lot of people. Note that there are still some
.doc files lurking around because filenames with the .txt extension already
existed, but I have currently cut down the amount of files with .doc
extensions from over 1,200 to about 20. So I think that's good enough for
now.
<P>
<B>March 25, 1999</B><P>
OK, things have calmed down to the point that I can think about raising
my head again. After the twin hits of slashdot.org and wired.com doing
articles, I was flooded with visitors. (You can read the Wired article
<A HREF="http://www.wired.com/news/print_version/culture/story/18175.html?wnpg=all">
here</A> and as a bonus, in
<A HREF="http://www.hotwired.co.jp/news/news/culture/story/2095.html">
Japanese</A>.)
<P>
Along with the gigabytes of files transferred out of here, I started to get
lots of donations of textfiles, and specifically archives of same. These have
ranged from URLs pointing me to still-surviving textfile groups, to two cases
of people uploading ENTIRE CDs of text to me! Now, those people who sent me
mail attachments are probably wondering what the hell happened to me. Well,
between the files I've already got waiting to sort through and the files that
people have been kind enough to send me, I'm looking at going through over
<B>FIFTY THOUSAND</B> of these things, sorting them, finding doubles, and all
the rest of what people do. As I finish someone's archives, I send them a thank
you and add a credit to the sources page. So I promise, everyone WILL be getting
responses from me. It's just a matter of when...
<P>
I'm down to an average of 500 visitors a day and 300 megabytes of transfer.
This is fine with me; the task of sorting files still lays ahead, and I'm going
to be spending a lot of free time making that happen. I'll consider the next
break point to be July, when I speak at DEFCON. Maybe by then I'll know what
I'm going to say.
<P>
Also, as time goes on, the classifications are sorting themselves out, so that
my goal of not having any one directory with more than five hundred files in
it is coming to fruition.
<P>
Oh, one other unexpected side effect: Since at this point I'm taking pretty
much <I>anything</I> coming down the pike (with the exception of Usenet
postings) the archive now spans from the 60's to a week ago, and covers so
many disparate subjects that the 80's BBS textfile experience is just a part
of what's here. Guess I'm buying a bigger hard drive!
<P>
<B>February 23, 1999</B><P>
At the suggestion of a lot of people, I tried some experiments with
putting up a search engine on TEXTFILES.COM. The result is not all that
great.
<P>
See, TEXTFILES.COM is running on a 486/33. This is fine for serving files,
and in fact, it's more than fine, because I watched it serve files to
14,000 users on Monday. But for the processor-intensive job of searching
all the files I have, even with the cute indexing that the program
<A HREF="http://www.htdig.org">(Htdig)</A> does, it slowed the machine
down when I, a singular person, was looking at it. How would even a
dozen users fare?
<P>
So as I see it, I can't currently add a search function for TEXTFILES.COM
unless one of two things happen: Either someone donates a part of THEIR
machine to become my search engine, or I go through with my original
plan to force HotBot to track my site and use their interface/power to
go through my site. But on the other hand, they don't always seem to
track the whole site with their indexer, so we'll see.
<P>
Either way, I'm trying. I really am.
<P>
<B>February 22, 1999</B><P>
Well, textfiles.com has finally hit the big time. We were mentioned
on <A HREF="http://www.slashdot.org">Slashdot</A> and this caused
my hits to go from about 40mb a day to over 4 gigabytes. The numbers
were staggering.
<P>
The system was staggering too, but not because of the slashdotters,
which in itself in amazing. No, it turns out the software I use
to keep track of hits to the system was running once a MINUTE
instead of once an HOUR, and it wasn't until the system slowed down
that I noticed this problem. So once that was fixed, the system
has held up VERY well! I've had over 15,000 people connect to the
system today, I'm being interviewed by Wired and people are coming
out of the woodwork to wax nostalgic and share their private
textfile collections, which means I can look forward to being even
larger in the weeks to come. Things are wonderful!
<P>
Also, I have signed on to be a speaker at
<A HREF="http://www.defcon.org">DEFCON</A> on the nature of textfiles
and the history that surrounds them. I hope my speech is entertaining
and enjoyable to people. I hope to meet lots of people there.
<P>
We can only go up from here. Welcome!
<P>
<B>January 29, 1999</B><P>
I'm most definitely a Perl convert. I knew it was a good language,
and I even took a class (on the company's tab) at Sun Microsystems
to learn it, but I came away with nothing really gnawing at my gut
to be PERLized.<P>
Enter the Ferret. Ferret (after the old Mascot of my BBS) was originally
a plain shell script, the purpose of which is to generate all these
directories of textfiles you see on this site. (I do NOT generate them
by hand; I would hope people know that.) It used to take, with my
original scripts, upwards of 12 minutes to compile some of the
larger directories, and I was going to optimize the shell scripts,
when I realized this was JUST the application to try writing in
Perl.
<P>
So I did, and after a night of careful hacking I've produced a
4k script (with comments) that does the same work in about 7 seconds.
I'll never go back. Maybe I'll do more of the site maintenance this
way.
<P>
<B>January 20, 1999</B><P>
Well, the last month has been spent describing all of the textfiles
currently on this site. With a couple more stories added to the
"textfiles I have known" section and a final do-over of a couple of
the (now-filled) directory headers, we should be ready to go "public".
I am most interested to see what effect, if any, this site has on
the world. Either I was completely wrong about this site's importance
or I'm going to be running from the press for the rest of my life.
<P>
Please note that this is NOT the entire collection of textfiles;
actually, it's about 5,000 of 10,000 that I have. I just haven't
sorted through the massive disks I've downloaded, yet. Also, there ARE a
few doubles buried in there. The program that will help me detect
doubles (because I'm not going to play a game of "concentration"
with 5,000 items) is going to have to be run on its own machine and
will probably be doing that across a week. That'll be a little later.
<P>
I invite comments, donations of textfiles, and helpful criticism.
<P>
<B>November 20, 1998</B><P>
You're lucky to find the place. People are starting to point to the site, but
it's by no means ready for prime time yet. I'm still integrating textfiles from
various sources including my own collection and that of others. <P>
As it currently stands, we're somewhere around 5,500 textfiles, of which
20 percent are Ham Radio. I'm still sorting through everything that came in
from the first run and then we'll see where we go from there. <P>
If you have textfiles not included in here, please mail them to me at
<A HREF="mailto:jason@textfiles.com">jason@textfiles.com</A> and I'll throw
them into the batch.
<P>Oh, and I contacted Net Nanny, Cyber Patrol and all the rest of those sites
to let them know to keep people the hell away from here, because <I>these
words is dangerous</I> and we wouldn't want kids READING, now would we?
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