Wednesday Website of the Week: textfiles.com

It's hard to believe, but there was a time before YouTube, and even before Wikipedia. It was a time in which knowledge, humor, and news online was delivered in a much simpler (if hard on the eyes) way: via textfiles. If you've always used a Mac, you might not have had that .tvt extension emblazoned on your retinas the same way our PC brethren did, but you would've still run into textfiles plenty of times. Textfiles.com is a wonderful repository of BBS postings, software manuals, and just about anything else ever sent as a textfile. This one, for example, teaches you "How To Hook an Apple IIgs up to a Linux Machine via a Dedicated Serial Line." Those were the days!

From the main index, you can also fins a whole subheading of Apple II documents. (Also worth noting you can turn off the period-accurate green on black display for black text on white, from the bottom of the screen.) It was a time when each connection to the local BBS or bulletin board system, could hold unknown treasures. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack, and you never knew if the needle would be any good once you found it. It was also a great way to happily stumble upon something unintended, compared to the pinpoint accuracy of today's search engines. I can't help but wonder if we've lost something along the way.