
textfiles.com - jhabdas
http://www.textfiles.com/
======
reitzensteinm
The 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=Chris...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSWqx8goqSY&ab_channel=Christiaan008)

~~~
Eremotherium
He also gave us the brilliant BBS: The Documentary

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dddbe9OuJLU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dddbe9OuJLU)

GET LAMP: The Text Adventure Documentary (shot in 1080p)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhbcDzbGSU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhbcDzbGSU)

and (apart from his many talks) his podcast "Jason Scott talks his way out of
it" which is just gem after gem of documented tech ephemera.

[https://textfiles.libsyn.com/](https://textfiles.libsyn.com/)

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.

~~~
ethagnawl
Jason Scott's podcast _Jason Scott Talks His Way Out of It_ is also endlessly
interesting, inspirational, entertaining and touching.

Archive.org:
[https://archive.org/details/jasonscotttalks](https://archive.org/details/jasonscotttalks)

Patreon:
[https://www.patreon.com/textfiles/posts](https://www.patreon.com/textfiles/posts)

------
shon
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.

~~~
textfiles
finger guns

------
magerleagues
If 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)

------
unixhero
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.

[http://cd.textfiles.com/group42/FAQS/ACAFFEIN.TXT](http://cd.textfiles.com/group42/FAQS/ACAFFEIN.TXT)

~~~
earthboundkid
> 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/52d4cb70e4b0ba94ab0ae...](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52d4cb70e4b0ba94ab0aea30/t/5a46b9740d92977993ce6582/1514584438778/MCM3_manual_004.pdf)
. The coffee control diagram is basically everything you need to tell a new
wannabe coffee snob.

~~~
artimaeis
Full 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
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.

~~~
kalleboo
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.

~~~
earthboundkid
Whereabouts do you live? I've visited places where I found tap water
undrinkable (Pennsylvania, Florida), but never lived in such a place.

~~~
kalleboo
Japan

~~~
earthboundkid
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itai-itai_disease)

------
textfiles
All are welcome, enjoy the site.

~~~
the137
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.

------
buttercakes
For those who remember or interested, there is a similar site that catalogs
the ANSI BBS art scene at
[http://sixteencolors.net/](http://sixteencolors.net/)

------
leetrout
I 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.

------
mark_l_watson
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.

~~~
teambayleaf
[http://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
Shockingly, here is the source of this recipe:

"International Cooking with Coca-Cola", a give-away pamphlet from The Coca-
Cola Company, 1981

------
londons_explore
Has 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?

~~~
every
You should poke around in gopher. Has a very dial-up BBS feel, complete with
FIGlets. Here is a nice web proxy:

[https://gopher.commons.host/](https://gopher.commons.host/)

~~~
Jaruzel
Floodgap is the de-facto home of Gopher:
[https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/](https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/)

If you are on Windows, I have written a nice modern gopher client:
[http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/gopher-client-browser-for-
wind...](http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/gopher-client-browser-for-windows)

~~~
anthk
I prefer gopher://magical.fish

~~~
Jaruzel
Ooh nice site - it's not been around that long either.

That said, Cameron Kaiser has done so much to promote gopher, I don't feel
it's fair to redirect people away from his site though.

~~~
anthk
Every Gopher hole is good, but magical.fish is a great showoff as an intro :D.

------
marcoperaza
> _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)

------
Scuds
The 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.

------
stakkur
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.

And Jason Scott is a saint.

------
HugoDaniel
Love the anarchy section:

[http://www.textfiles.com/anarchy/](http://www.textfiles.com/anarchy/)

~~~
auxym
Reminds 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
i miss that site, hella nostalgia just hearing the name.

------
paraboul
Reminds 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/)

------
londons_explore
Could 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.

~~~
saagarjha
If you are an adult, why would your internet connection have any reason to
block it?

~~~
londons_explore
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".

------
newsbinator
[http://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

------
aphrax
Whenever 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..

------
movedx
"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

------
CalRobert
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.

~~~
TedDoesntTalk
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.

~~~
mypalmike
Ugh I remember trying to dl files using XMODEM at 300 baud. Like maybe 10% of
the time it would work. ZMODEM was a huge improvement in reliability.

------
Mc91
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?)

------
js2
From
[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.)

------
ChrisMarshallNY
I 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
Not 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
Awesome! Thanks!

------
codazoda
I 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
From 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
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.

------
yosito
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/](https://iamlocaljo.com/experience/)

------
qppo
Man AIDS was scary in the 90s. Fun to see the same conspiracy theories come
back for Covid.

------
29athrowaway
This is a good one, "Anatomy of a pirate":

[http://textfiles.com/piracy/anatomy.txt](http://textfiles.com/piracy/anatomy.txt)

------
wanderingjew
Looking forward to the Twitter commentary on this thread.

------
david_draco
A gif?! That would have been an opportunity to appropriately use the <blink>
tag!

~~~
dgellow
No 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
with WebComponents it's trivial to implement.

------
kleiba
While we're at it: @textfiles, any more awesome documentaries in the pipeline?

~~~
textfiles
Nope, retired.

~~~
kleiba
Good for you! :)

But bad for us :(

Love your work.

------
lowwave
Hmmm, why doesn't the site have https?

~~~
oneplane
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.

~~~
csixty4
> 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
Doesn'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.

~~~
anthk
Good luck trying to a attack an HTML only browser under a Z80 machine, for
example.

~~~
oneplane
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.

~~~
anthk
links in Unix for example has automatic refreshing as a checkbox.

~~~
oneplane
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.

------
tomcooks
> blinkenlights

right in the feels.

------
ChrisArchitect
legendary, often posted content/site - newsworthy right now for any reason OP?

------
mhb
Shouldn't have stolen the color scheme from jwz. Now we have two problems.

~~~
corobo
Green on black is a colour scheme from old terminals..

~~~
codazoda
This. The monitors of the time were called monochrome. Most of them came in
green or amber.

~~~
jaclaz
... and at the time we didn't brag about "dark mode" in "apps", there was only
_this_ mode ...

