______  textfiles for the bored published whenever newtown11@gmail.com
| ____| this file can be distributed w/o my permission. just keep my name!
| |___   ____   ____  ______    /  \    _   _   ___   ____
| ____| | xx | |   _| | ____   / /\ \  | |_/ ) | __| |  _ \
| |     | xx | |  |   ____ |  / /  \ \ |  _ (  | |_| | | | |
|_|     |_xx_| |__|   |____|  -> -> -> |_| \_) | |_  |_| |_|
#1 in a D.O.A series,  november 22, 2009  ^_^  |___| <- <- <-

Nostalgia and You

Alright, I admit it, I'm a bottom-feeder, a leech, etc, but all in all I'm an uppity fool 
who thinks he knows so much about BBSes, textfiles, whatever. In true reality I'm just a 
bored 13-year-old running Telenet on Terminal and not even being able to view ANSI because 
Terminal sucks and SyncTERM won't bother to open. I read textfiles every day, to try to 
see how the bored teens of the 80's and 90's lived their lives, in cramped bedrooms 
sweating over the screech of the low-baud dial-up modem, wether the FBI would kill them 
for dialing up for free, and/or the next messsage or artpack that would take 5 minutes to 
load.

Yeah, so I really don't know much of the history. I can't do much to save my ass anyway 
because I was born a year after Mosaic and the Web shot the reputations of BBSes forever 
and made so many people incredibly ignorant about technology that if you handed them a 
floppy they'd attempt to open it but if you gave them Netscape and a deathwish they'd be 
getting the hots over Leonardo DiWhatshisname on entertainment.movies.manwhores any day.

But I know something at least. I feel happy with the BBSes of now, built on archaic tech, 
but with people able to make friendships, great discussions, and just general chitchat, 
out of 128 basic characters. The unknown souls of the 80s and 90s knew how to do it, and 
so do the BBSers of today.

I enjoy the BBSes of now when I can find an active one. I don't do it for the nostalgia, 
the novelty, nor for the sake of establishing "relic" status, but because they're 
wonderful to use. Because on them I can tiptoe by the old formulaic threads and the 
monotony often seen on the Web forums that have popped up everywhere. The history, though, 
is still important to establish an understanding of days gone by.

-forsaken

"When a historian or reporter tries to capture the feelings and themes that proliferated 
through the BBS Scene of the early 1980's, the reader nearly always experiences a mere 
glimpse of what went on. This is probably true of most any third-party reporting, but when 
the culture is your own, and when the experiences were your own, the gap between story and 
reality is that much wider, and it's that much harder to sit back and let the 
cliche-filled summary become "The Way It Was." You want to do something, anything so that 
the people who stumble onto the part of history that was yours know what it was like to 
grow up through it, to meet the people you did, to do the things you enjoyed doing. Maybe, 
you hope, they might even see the broader picture and the conclusions that you yourself 
couldn't see at the time. This is history the way the chronicled want it to be." -Jason 
Scott Proprietor, TEXTFILES.COM