50 lines
3.1 KiB
Plaintext
50 lines
3.1 KiB
Plaintext
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______ textfiles for the bored published whenever newtown11@gmail.com
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| ____| this file can be distributed w/o my permission. just keep my name!
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| |___ ____ ____ ______ / \ _ _ ___ ____
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| ____| | xx | | _| | ____ / /\ \ | |_/ ) | __| | _ \
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| | | xx | | | ____ | / / \ \ | _ ( | |_| | | | |
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|_| |_xx_| |__| |____| -> -> -> |_| \_) | |_ |_| |_|
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#1 in a D.O.A series, november 22, 2009 ^_^ |___| <- <- <-
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Nostalgia and You
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Alright, I admit it, I'm a bottom-feeder, a leech, etc, but all in all I'm an uppity fool
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who thinks he knows so much about BBSes, textfiles, whatever. In true reality I'm just a
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bored 13-year-old running Telenet on Terminal and not even being able to view ANSI because
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Terminal sucks and SyncTERM won't bother to open. I read textfiles every day, to try to
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see how the bored teens of the 80's and 90's lived their lives, in cramped bedrooms
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sweating over the screech of the low-baud dial-up modem, wether the FBI would kill them
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for dialing up for free, and/or the next messsage or artpack that would take 5 minutes to
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load.
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Yeah, so I really don't know much of the history. I can't do much to save my ass anyway
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because I was born a year after Mosaic and the Web shot the reputations of BBSes forever
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and made so many people incredibly ignorant about technology that if you handed them a
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floppy they'd attempt to open it but if you gave them Netscape and a deathwish they'd be
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getting the hots over Leonardo DiWhatshisname on entertainment.movies.manwhores any day.
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But I know something at least. I feel happy with the BBSes of now, built on archaic tech,
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but with people able to make friendships, great discussions, and just general chitchat,
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out of 128 basic characters. The unknown souls of the 80s and 90s knew how to do it, and
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so do the BBSers of today.
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I enjoy the BBSes of now when I can find an active one. I don't do it for the nostalgia,
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the novelty, nor for the sake of establishing "relic" status, but because they're
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wonderful to use. Because on them I can tiptoe by the old formulaic threads and the
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monotony often seen on the Web forums that have popped up everywhere. The history, though,
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is still important to establish an understanding of days gone by.
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-forsaken
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"When a historian or reporter tries to capture the feelings and themes that proliferated
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through the BBS Scene of the early 1980's, the reader nearly always experiences a mere
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glimpse of what went on. This is probably true of most any third-party reporting, but when
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the culture is your own, and when the experiences were your own, the gap between story and
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reality is that much wider, and it's that much harder to sit back and let the
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cliche-filled summary become "The Way It Was." You want to do something, anything so that
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the people who stumble onto the part of history that was yours know what it was like to
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grow up through it, to meet the people you did, to do the things you enjoyed doing. Maybe,
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you hope, they might even see the broader picture and the conclusions that you yourself
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couldn't see at the time. This is history the way the chronicled want it to be." -Jason
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Scott Proprietor, TEXTFILES.COM
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