Apple II Textfiles
textfiles.com
Apple II Textfiles
1–10 of 26 posts
Re: Apple II Textfiles
#2The Apple II history series by Steven Weyhrich is wonderful if you’re a fan of knowing minute details about the various Apple II models. Having started my Apple II experience with the IIe I learned a lot about the models that came before. I was surprised and pleased at the level of technical detail he went into.
Re: Apple II Textfiles
#3I was kind of expecting this to be about the fact that beginning with the Apple ][ and running up to (and maybe even a little past) the introduction of OS X, text files on Apple computers used ^M as the line delimiter as opposed to ^J on Unixes and ^M^J on DOS.
Re: Apple II Textfiles
#4I always enjoy when this resurfaces. I wrote one of the files on there when I was a teenager.
And it'll outlive me.
Re: Apple II Textfiles
#5I always enjoy when this resurfaces. I wrote one of the files on there when I was a teenager. And it'll outlive me.
How were the files compiled and distributed before they ended up on this website? How did your opportunity to contribute to them come about?
Re: Apple II Textfiles
#6I always enjoy when this resurfaces. I wrote one of the files on there when I was a teenager. And it'll outlive me.
How were the files compiled and distributed before they ended up on this website? How did your opportunity to contribute to them come about?
The vast majority of files on Textfiles.com came from BBSs in the 1980s and early 90s. The founder, Jason Scott made an awesome documentary about the BBS days. Steven Levy also covers the time and the scene somewhat towards the end of his fantastically detailed book “Hackers”
Re: Apple II Textfiles
#7I wish there was a way to duplicate this but it just a fact that the industry got so profitable that these kinds of shared materials get hit by DMCA
Re: Apple II Textfiles
#8I always enjoy when this resurfaces. I wrote one of the files on there when I was a teenager. And it'll outlive me.
How were the files compiled and distributed before they ended up on this website? How did your opportunity to contribute to them come about?
I wrote it by myself, there was a certain program I was using (pirating) and nobody else had the manual for it. And you really didn't scan things into PDFs back then. A disk only held 140KB. So I spent a weekend and figured things out by trial-and-error and wrote it up. Did it in a text editor and uploaded it to my favorite BBS.
Distribution happened lots of ways. A BBS might trade files with a friendly BBS somewhere else. Some people collected them like Pokemon and traded them. Having something valuable that others wanted was a currency. Maybe I sent you my G-File collection and you sent me Dr J vs Larry Bird.
Eventually these files diffused all over the planet and wound up in collections on the internet and CD-ROMs at hamfests. They will spring up in the most unlikely of places.
It's fun to look back on it now, but it wasn't always wonderful. Calling BBSes could get expensive, transmitting files tied up your system for an entire night (no multitasking!) for something that took up less space than a Facebook tracking cookie. The hardware and bandwidth I'm using now would have been incomprehensible back then.
Re: Apple II Textfiles
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
How were the files compiled and distributed before they ended up on this website? How did your opportunity to contribute to them come about?
The vast majority of files on Textfiles.com came from BBSs in the 1980s and early 90s. The founder, Jason Scott made an awesome documentary about the BBS days. Steven Levy also covers the time and the scene somewhat towards the end of his fantastically detailed book “Hackers”
The Jason Scott documentary is highly recommended. I knew Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, they were pretty interesting people. (RIP Randy, he passed away near the end of 2019)
Re: Apple II Textfiles
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
How were the files compiled and distributed before they ended up on this website? How did your opportunity to contribute to them come about?
The vast majority of files on Textfiles.com came from BBSs in the 1980s and early 90s. The founder, Jason Scott made an awesome documentary about the BBS days. Steven Levy also covers the time and the scene somewhat towards the end of his fantastically detailed book “Hackers”
Jason regularly streams his archiving activity on Twitch under the username "textfiles". It's usually a quiet stream- he's been digitizing a lot of videotapes recently.