Textfiles.com

textfiles.com is a web site run by Jason Scott dedicated to preserving the digital documents that contain the history of the BBS world and various subcultures. The site categorises and stores thousands of ASCII files. It focuses on text files from the 1980s, but also contains some older files and some that were created well into the 1990s.

The site went online in 1998. According to Scott, the site had approximately 150,000 unique visitors per month as of 2004. An updated file count was last posted on July 1, 2005; at that time, the number of files archived by the site was 58,227.

The text files in the archive cover a wide range of topics, including anarchy, art, carding, computers, drugs, Freemasonry, games, hacking, phreaking, politics, piracy, sex and UFOs. Many ezines are also included in the archive. One of the oldest archives is the first decade (1923–1935) of Short Talk Bulletin, the monthly periodical of the Masonic Service Association.

The site provides a "glimpse into the history of writers and artists bound by the 128 characters that the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) allowed them." The authors of the philes are often anonymous or identified only by BBS pseudonyms. They have been collected from an assortment of different sources, mostly BBSs.

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