Sam Danielson

Huge link: textfiles.com

Who remembers the days of the BBS, WW4 BBS software, ANSI Art, Demos, the never ending story, .mod music, Fidonet, and Gopher? Long ago in a place not so far away I remember those things. Busy signals and 1200 baud were just the nature of the meduim. Pressing the down arrow would begin the Z-modem transfer of knowledge to my machine, a 286 with 2 megabytes of memory and an 80 megabyte IDE dirve. Then there was Usenet with all it’s uuencoded glory, (you know what I’m talking about) and the only way in was through the local BBS portal. Things have changed a lot since then, mostly for the better, but something is lost.

Is it that I’m grown? Do children still get the same sense of wonder and enlightenment while browsing the advertising driven services of today? The world used to lie beyond a blinking cursor on the dark screen. Is it still all there?

Some of that wonderful old world is still with us thanks to Jason Scott, the SysOp of textfiles.com.