I recently found textfiles.com, a museum of sorts on the Internet. The site claims to be 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”, and it follows through with its claim very well. It focuses on text files from the late 1970s until the early 1990s, when the Internet was much smaller, had fewer users, and far fewer platforms and protocols to transfer data with. This was the heydey of BBSs and newsgroups, when images took whole minutes to load and the bulk of data sent on the Internet was simply text.

Take a look; I’ve found a good number of interesting things, some of which are useful, some of which are hilariously outdated.