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.
There are some ugly things down in these archives; there are narcissistic ravings from pre-adolescent social misfits. There are calls for anarchy. There's satanism, there's racism, there's all the -isms in the book lurking in the words. But there's hope, too. There's excitement, there's joy, there's every manner of feeling being crammed down into ASCII and posted for the world to find. It's a spectrum of humanity, and this is what I hope you'll find, buried there, among the text. Enjoy. (Textfiles website).
media-underground.net