Textfiles.com
January 23, 2003 9:42 PM   Subscribe

Textfiles.com: Before the Web, before Google, we scoured Fidonet, absorbing the forbidden fruits of anarchy, occult and a lot of bad fiction. For better or worse, TEXTFILES are relics of that age.
posted by magnificentsven (12 comments total)
 
Holy smoly! PHRACK!
posted by Stan Chin at 10:25 PM on January 23, 2003


awesome! Brings me back to the days of FidoNet! [this is good]
posted by Vidiot at 10:33 PM on January 23, 2003


this is great, mag7. thanks.
posted by moz at 11:41 PM on January 23, 2003


Yeah I remember phrack, but this sites outdated since issue 60 came out last month.
posted by bobo123 at 1:08 AM on January 24, 2003


As sort-of tangentially discussed before a couple of times. Not calling double-post here, just mentioning it in passing.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 3:44 AM on January 24, 2003


It's like being 17 again.
posted by spazzm at 4:38 AM on January 24, 2003


Very, very cool.
posted by IshmaelGraves at 5:25 AM on January 24, 2003


Yea, Stan, Phrack is alive and well at phrack.org. Check out the amusing redirect of the URL when you go, though! ;)
posted by cyrusdogstar at 6:44 AM on January 24, 2003


Hey, the old Ninja Warrior lockpicking series! I learned a lot from that!

And they have a good chunk of the Shawn Da Lay Boy Productions stuff. That brings back many a fuzzy, staggering memory.

'...we scoured Fidonet...'

Was there anything particularly interesting on FidoNet? Perhaps its a local phenomenon, but FidoNet sysops I remember as being mainly straightlaced, uptight guys in their 40s with lots of rules about what you weren't allowed to do or say and a hysterical fear of even the appearance of impropriety. "Forbidden fruit" of any kind seems antithetical to the kind of stick-up-the-ass culcture FidoNet sold itself as.
posted by majick at 7:10 AM on January 24, 2003


majick: you're partially right. most FidoNet SyOps were pretty straight laced, but a few nodes had some of that "ELiTE" content. I remember staying up all night setting up Front Door (FD 2.0) so that I could be part of their nightly crappy file exchange system.

The whole reason I stumbled on textfiles: I was ego surfing on Google last night and I found a REALLY horrible SF story I wrote in college that is archived there.

For the love of god, how do I get that deleted?
posted by magnificentsven at 8:07 AM on January 24, 2003


Whoohoo, all those Discordian texts in one {fnord} handy location.
posted by Foosnark at 9:32 AM on January 24, 2003


I remember getting a long lecture from a Fidonet sysop - like fifteen minutes - all because he wasn't happy with the address details I'd typed in and insisted on me picking up the phone to talk to him. Of course, once I did get on the board it turned out to be identical to every other one with no interesting or unique content and exactly the same boards as everywhere else. Starbucks could have done well in the BBS world...
posted by kerplunk at 12:43 PM on January 24, 2003


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