textfiles.com

The site gathers what circulated on the boards before the web: t-files on everything from locks to blue boxes, groups' brag lists, ASCII art and ads for individual BBSes. The material is deliberately left raw, often with the originals' typos and line breaks intact, because the form is part of the document.

Behind it stands a single person with a collector's mania and a conviction that trivial files are worth saving precisely because no one else keeps them. The archive later grew to cover ANSI art, disk magazines and much else, and became a template for a whole wave of digital preservation.