textfiles.com • Hacker News Board

Re: textfiles.com

#31

Post by gravitas » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 1:43 PM UTC

mhb wrote: post #5

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

February 1999, textfiles.com colour scheme predates jwz.org.

https://web.archive.org/web/19990203134049/http://www.textfi...

https://web.archive.org/web/19990208014216/http://www.jwz.or...

Re: textfiles.com

#32

Post by codazoda » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 1:46 PM UTC

corobo wrote: post #17

mhb wrote: post #5

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

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

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

Re: textfiles.com

#33

Post by codazoda » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 1:48 PM UTC

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.

Re: textfiles.com

#34

Post by hrdwdmrbl » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 1:51 PM UTC

reitzensteinm wrote: post #6

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...

The owner is also a totally great guy

Re: textfiles.com

#35

Post by magerleagues » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 1:53 PM UTC

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

Re: textfiles.com

#36

Post by Jaruzel » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 1:53 PM UTC

every wrote: post #28

londons_explore wrote: post #4

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?

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/

Floodgap is the de-facto home of 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...

Re: textfiles.com

#37

Post by myth_drannon » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 1:56 PM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #4

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?

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.

Re: textfiles.com

#38

Post by anthk » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 2:00 PM UTC

caseyw wrote: post #11

londons_explore wrote: post #4

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?

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.

CHeck Neocities.

Re: textfiles.com

#39

Post by lowwave » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 2:00 PM UTC

Hmmm, why doesn't the site have https?

Re: textfiles.com

#40

Post by mark_l_watson » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 2:02 PM UTC

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.