131–140 of 196 posts
Love the anarchy section: http://www.textfiles.com/anarchy/
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.
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...
He also gave us the brilliant BBS: The Documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dddbe9OuJLU GET LAMP: The Text Adventure Documentary (shot in 1080p) 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/ It's baffingly hard to quantify how many people he (and…
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.
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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.
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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 ne…
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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…
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 le…
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.
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
I always loved this story of his: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1127 For some reason, the original is gone. That's his sequel.
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
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...
He also gave us the brilliant BBS: The Documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dddbe9OuJLU GET LAMP: The Text Adventure Documentary (shot in 1080p) 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/ It's baffingly hard to quantify how many people he (and…
Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/jasonscotttalks
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?
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.