Return of the Living BBS 
by Joe Nickell (j@rox.com)

--
Nostalgic for the pre-Internet '80s? A former teen BBS-junkie attempts
to archive the evanescent history of digital culture on the Web. 
--

There was a time when cobbled-together technology and underground culture
converged to form digital communities that felt genuine, even revolutionary.
In the 1980s, few people had ever heard of the Internet. But it was the
golden age of the BBS. 

The remains of that heady time largely lie scattered on dusty 5 1/4-inch
floppy disks and tape backups, forgotten as pimply bulletin board hackers
and fone phreaks morphed into 20-something network admins and database
programmers.

"It depressed me so much a year ago when I would search the Web for these
terms that I remembered -- the Neon Knights, or Sherwood Forest II -- and
there was nothing out there from that time period," said Jason Scott, a 
28-year old Boston-area UNIX system administrator. 

He might have remained wistful. Instead, Scott decided to do something
about it. The result is Textfiles.com (www.textfiles.com), a Web site
compendium of more than 9,000 rants, recipes, and revolutions-in-the-making
that Scott and others accumulated during their days as teenage BBS-junkies.

There's this whole historical aspect of online culture that was about to be
lost," said Scott, who's still 30,000 files shy of posting everything he's
collected onto the Web site. "I think these files have a certain character
and a lot of passion that reflects that time period."

Scott first began collecting textfiles, or t-files, when he was eleven years
old, using his dad's IBM PC and a Hayes 300-baud modem. While other kids
exchanged source code for pirated Apple II games and long distance access
codes, Scott became most interested in the texts that BBS owners and visitors
traded like baseball cards -- the politically-charged, 80s version of
dancing babies and office humor.

As a youthful entrepreneur, Scott had a run-in with the FBI, when he sold
a recipe for nitroglycerine downloaded from a Chicago survivalist BBS to a
junior high school friend for 50 cents. Confronted by his mom, his principal,
and an FBI investigator, the 13-year old Scott rolled over on the BBS, which
was subsequently shut down.

That didn't kill Scott's passion for collecting the bizarre and 
revolutionary. Textfiles.com contains everything from instructions for
growing psychedelic mushrooms or scamming phone companies, to baffling
occult rituals, first-hand accounts of UFO abductions, even the 
nitroglycerine recipe. 
  
"It's pretty wonderful," said Howard Rheingold, author of Virtual 
Communities: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, and a fan of the site.
"ASCII art. Who knows about ASCII art these days? But it was a big deal
in BBSs and Usenet.... We tend to forget, with all the attention on the
Yahoos and AOLs, that where online culture came from was the idea that
everyone could be the center of a scene. The Net eats its own history, but
at the same time, it never quite digests it."

Scott isn't the first to attempt to archive the evanescent history of digital
culture on the Web. From Ghost Sites, a directory of outdated Web sites, to
the Digital Landfill, a collection of files donated from visitors' desktop
trash bins, fascination with old data has become the newest craze among
armchair historians.

Last year, software company Alexa donated a sculpture of the Web to the 
Library of Congress. The digital sculpture is built out of the more than
500,000 Web sites archived by Alexa since 1996.

While it all may smell suspiciously of nostalgia, Scott won't suffer those
who long for the days before mom and pop showed up online.

"The one thing I don't hold truck with is people saying to me that
everything's gone downhill since then, that the new people are ruining
everything," said Scott. "It took me four years to track down all these
textfiles; people can now download them in 45 minutes. 

"That's not going downhill."