Get It While You Can -www.textfiles.com
Mar. 7th, 2003 12:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tcpipA TORRENT OF TEXTFILES
This Site (And Torrent) Closes on March 15!
The short form: all of textfiles.com is now available in some very large archives, which are downloadable via a program called Bittorrent. Have at and enjoy. It is likely these will go away at some point. This does not mean the end of my work on textfiles, I just happen to like you people a lot.
Name of File Size of Archive
textfiles.com.tar.bzip2.TORRENT 715736057 Bytes (682mb)
textfiles.com.tar.gzip.TORRENT 891886576 Bytes (850mb)
textfiles.com.zip.TORRENT 940893352 Bytes (897mb)
What I'm Trying to Do
It is almost inevitable, when offering the amount of files and information that the textfiles.com page has, to expect that forces both political and legal will want some piece of it. Either someone arbitrarily decides that something written years ago breaks a law, or they change the laws to retroactively make such information illegal. Threats to do this very thing have come to me many times over the lifetime of this project, and they make me feel sick inside.
Naturally, after spending basically half a decade collecting the files as I have, want to ensure that they're not lost again. I have said in several arenas that the best way to do this is to turn the site into a complete "ware", a self-contained archive that people can then trade amongst each other or keep safely away until the next generation of people want to learn about this special time in our past. So I have done that, with the release of this archive, "The Textfiles.com Take".
The last time I offered all of textfiles.com up for download, I got a call from my colocation facility asking me what was wrong, because my machines were slowing down the building. That's some pretty major demand, and I had to remove the download link. I felt bad about that; if someone had the capacity and disk space to keep a copy of all this work (and all my work in collecting it), they should have it!
Enter Bittorrent
Bittorrent is a program by Bram Cohen that basically creates a peer-to-peer downloading environment from a given file. That is, everyone who is downloading a file is also sharing some of their upload bandwidth with other people who are downloading. This means that the load for downloads ais a lot less for the hapless server on the front (mine) and people are getting their file nicely.
I've gone ahead and created this bittorrent server and linkset from an archive I created and compressed three different ways. Most people will use .zip because they like it, but there's also gzip and bzip2 archives as well.
Bittorrent works very well for what it does, and I'm happy to use it to make this file offering.
The Archive Itself
What you get with this (very large) archive is all of textfiles.com as it stands in the present time, as well as all of web.textfiles.com, etext.textfiles.com, and digest.textfiles.com. Basically, these are all text-based subsets of the main site, so no trickery. There's also a number of bonus materials, including an mp3 of a speech I gave at PhreakNIC last year and a host of photos and other bbs artifacts. The entire archive, uncompressed, is 2 gigabytes.
What you should do with This Archive
Grab it, share it, give it away. Give it to someone who knows nothing about BBSes so now they will. Put it up somewhere for download. Peel off a directory and put it up on your site because you like the files so much. Use the files as the test material for a search engine. The point is, keep it and do what you want. I wanted these files to be saved, and to be read, not locked away or not touched. You should feel free to use them any way you wish.
And thank you for helping to preserve this precious online history.
- Jason Scott
TEXTFILES.COM
This Site (And Torrent) Closes on March 15!
The short form: all of textfiles.com is now available in some very large archives, which are downloadable via a program called Bittorrent. Have at and enjoy. It is likely these will go away at some point. This does not mean the end of my work on textfiles, I just happen to like you people a lot.
Name of File Size of Archive
textfiles.com.tar.bzip2.TORRENT 715736057 Bytes (682mb)
textfiles.com.tar.gzip.TORRENT 891886576 Bytes (850mb)
textfiles.com.zip.TORRENT 940893352 Bytes (897mb)
What I'm Trying to Do
It is almost inevitable, when offering the amount of files and information that the textfiles.com page has, to expect that forces both political and legal will want some piece of it. Either someone arbitrarily decides that something written years ago breaks a law, or they change the laws to retroactively make such information illegal. Threats to do this very thing have come to me many times over the lifetime of this project, and they make me feel sick inside.
Naturally, after spending basically half a decade collecting the files as I have, want to ensure that they're not lost again. I have said in several arenas that the best way to do this is to turn the site into a complete "ware", a self-contained archive that people can then trade amongst each other or keep safely away until the next generation of people want to learn about this special time in our past. So I have done that, with the release of this archive, "The Textfiles.com Take".
The last time I offered all of textfiles.com up for download, I got a call from my colocation facility asking me what was wrong, because my machines were slowing down the building. That's some pretty major demand, and I had to remove the download link. I felt bad about that; if someone had the capacity and disk space to keep a copy of all this work (and all my work in collecting it), they should have it!
Enter Bittorrent
Bittorrent is a program by Bram Cohen that basically creates a peer-to-peer downloading environment from a given file. That is, everyone who is downloading a file is also sharing some of their upload bandwidth with other people who are downloading. This means that the load for downloads ais a lot less for the hapless server on the front (mine) and people are getting their file nicely.
I've gone ahead and created this bittorrent server and linkset from an archive I created and compressed three different ways. Most people will use .zip because they like it, but there's also gzip and bzip2 archives as well.
Bittorrent works very well for what it does, and I'm happy to use it to make this file offering.
The Archive Itself
What you get with this (very large) archive is all of textfiles.com as it stands in the present time, as well as all of web.textfiles.com, etext.textfiles.com, and digest.textfiles.com. Basically, these are all text-based subsets of the main site, so no trickery. There's also a number of bonus materials, including an mp3 of a speech I gave at PhreakNIC last year and a host of photos and other bbs artifacts. The entire archive, uncompressed, is 2 gigabytes.
What you should do with This Archive
Grab it, share it, give it away. Give it to someone who knows nothing about BBSes so now they will. Put it up somewhere for download. Peel off a directory and put it up on your site because you like the files so much. Use the files as the test material for a search engine. The point is, keep it and do what you want. I wanted these files to be saved, and to be read, not locked away or not touched. You should feel free to use them any way you wish.
And thank you for helping to preserve this precious online history.
- Jason Scott
TEXTFILES.COM