Transcripts from dial-up services?

[jfoust]

From '85 until '94 or so, I saved my transcripts from visiting the Amiga  communities of CompuServe, PeopleLink, Delphi, Genie, BIX, the Well, etc.

I've thought about writing some code to parse these text files to reconstruct  the message threads or file archives from these forums, and making them available on a web site.

Out of a concern for file space on floppies, I know I would often edit these text transcripts and remove posts that I didn't want to save - so I know I didn't save everything.

Did anyone else save transcripts of their ASCII modem surfing?

[jfoust]

Yes, I know Jason of textfiles.com and he's interested in this topic, too. He says he hasn't found anyone else with saved transcripts. Surely I can't be the only one. I dunno - I may be a digital packrat, but a decade of near-daily surfing of pay services only consumed a shoebox full of 5 1/4" floppies holding Zip archives of text files - maybe 300 megs, and when expanded, back to four or five times that size.

[jfoust]

I can't believe my archive is unique. I'd like to think some of the forum sysops kept copies similar to mine.

As for my last desktop Amiga, I imaged the hard drives and can run them as-is in emulation under Windows.

[jfoust]

Do you remember how you saved them? Just a stream of what came across your modem? Yes, that's the kind of message I'd add to this web.

[jfoust]

So what's under the hood of the FidoNet web?  I planned to do it in PHP and MySQL.  

I used to talk with Tom Jennings about ASCII art, teletypes, and the old Dead Media Project.