WWWTXT: web archive of 1980-94

The artist who specializes in digital art, Daniel Rehn from Los Angeles, has another unusual hobby. In 2011, he opened the WWWTXT website, where he collected digital documents of a bygone era: from 1980 to 1994.

Surprisingly, already at that time, Internet users talked about cyberpunk, digital currencies, online sex and other advanced topics.

Now the WWWTXT collection contains more than 100 GB of documents and continues to grow. Basically, it is replenished with texts and pictures from Usenet (analogue of Fido) and BBS - electronic bulletin boards, the predecessors of modern websites. Before the advent of the web, people communicated and exchanged files on a BBS. To get to one of them, it was necessary to dial a certain phone number using a modem and establish a connection with the computer of the station operator.
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Probably today WWWTXT is the largest collection of its kind on the Internet. Maybe there are more documents in the Google or Internet Archive index, but WWWTXT contains a thematic selection from a specific era.


Computer configuration sample 1988

Daniel Ren himself is well acquainted with those times. In the mid-1980s, at the age of 9 or 10, he launched his own BBS in Illinois, where he laid out various demos and copies of digital art. To do this, he called on other major BBS in New York or San Francisco, downloaded files from there and posted them at his place. Thus, users did not have to spend money on long-distance communication.


Advertisement LLamasoft, 1984

Daniel Wren admits that what he saw on the BBS "completely changed his personality and influenced his future life." Probably, anyone who has a modem in those years can say this. As one user said in August 1985: “There are strange things here. Very, very strange . ”