Before screenshots, social feeds and video ate most online conversation, an enormous amount of computer culture traveled as plain text. TEXTFILES.COM exists because Jason Scott kept copies.
Browse the TEXTFILES.COM directory
Scott started the site in 1998 with a specific mission: make available the BBS text files he had collected during his youth. These were the files that moved through dial-up bulletin board systems — stories, FAQs, technical notes, jokes, phreaking lore, game material, rants, newsletters and the miscellaneous debris people create whenever storage gets cheap enough to waste creatively.
The project did not stay small.
Scott later described the broader TEXTFILES.COM family as holding more than a terabyte of computer history. Separate collections expanded into CD-ROMs, shareware and other material that did not fit neatly into the original BBS archive.
Copy the damn thing
One of the best parts of the project is its attitude toward preservation.
Scott has repeatedly encouraged mirroring and bulk copying. In a 2003 essay about archiving, he wrote about finding entire copies of TEXTFILES.COM circulating on peer-to-peer networks and being delighted rather than offended. The important part was that the files had escaped dependence on one server.
That idea aged extremely well.
A preservation project that can only survive while one domain, one company and one administrator remain healthy is not very preserved.
The site was deliberately structured so people could take copies without being married to its HTML presentation. Directory description files made the collection easier to move and rebuild elsewhere.
For webmasters, there is a serious lesson hiding underneath the mountain of BBS weirdness: exportability is a feature. Simple files, descriptive metadata and stable paths survive organizational changes better than content trapped inside an application nobody can run ten years later.
A collection became history
When TEXTFILES.COM began, much of the material was recent enough to be remembered as junk from dial-up systems. Keep junk long enough and suddenly researchers want it.
Scott went on to make BBS: The Documentary, work on other computer-history projects and become an archivist at the Internet Archive. The old text-file collection sits near the beginning of that path.
It is also one of the 1,967 sites in CacheRat’s Ancient Web research list — which is admittedly a very on-brand place for it to end up.
Explore the full Ancient Web Domains research list
TEXTFILES.COM is still useful for the same reason an old shoebox of disks can be useful: nobody knew which apparently stupid file would become interesting later.