Apple II Textfiles
textfiles.com
textfiles.com
And it'll outlive me.
Distribution happened lots of ways. A BBS might trade files with a friendly BBS somewhere else. Some people collected them like Pokemon and traded them. Having something valuable that others wanted was a currency. Maybe I sent you my G-File collection and you sent me Dr J vs Larry Bird.
Eventually these files diffused all over the planet and wound up in collections on the internet and CD-ROMs at hamfests. They will spring up in the most unlikely of places.
It's fun to look back on it now, but it wasn't always wonderful. Calling BBSes could get expensive, transmitting files tied up your system for an entire night (no multitasking!) for something that took up less space than a Facebook tracking cookie. The hardware and bandwidth I'm using now would have been incomprehensible back then.
Mine and many others were distributed on file sharing sites called AE Servers. And yes, BBSs, too.
Some of the more popular files were the ones typed up from The Anarchist’s Cookbook, and peoples’ variations on those (bomb making, lock picking, etc). I never knew that was a real book until many years later.
A bulletin board system (BBS), also called computer bulletin board service (CBBS),[1] is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging messages with other users through public message boards and sometimes via direct chatting. In the early 1980s, message networks such as FidoNet were developed to provide services such as NetMail, which is similar to internet-based email.[2]
By the by, in the UK local calls were billed, whereas (I think) they are/were free in the US so BBSs were much thinner on the ground as they were so much more expensive to connect to - and to run if the owner offered FidoNet etc.
Later on some phone companies offered "call-paks" which allowed unlimited calls to numbers in the same area code. But that still didn't cover long-distance. FIDOnet was a clever way to let you call locally and still work nationally.
Operation Sundevil took down a lot of the hubs for trafficking LD codes, but by that time a lot of BBSes were turning into internet ISPs and modeming over long distances wasn't necessary. Things faded off after that.
Local calls are calls which stay within a local exchange and there is usually no charge for them. Calls between local exchanges within a LATA, intraLATA, are local toll calls and are billed. These days there is expanded local exchange calling which allows for calling between certain local exchanges within a LATA without a fee, but back in the day this didn't really exist. Long distance calls are those which go between different LATAs.
Local toll calls were the most expensive calls to make because there was no competition for those calls. There were multiple competing long distance services which kept costs lower for those.
Depending upon where your local exchange boundary fell calling a local BBS could be more expensive than calling one that was across the country. My local user group BBS was physically located 20 miles from me but was in my local exchange so no charge to call. A friend who was physically located 2 miles from me ran a BBS and it was an expensive local toll call for me.
This is based upon how the system has worked since the AT&T breakup in the early 80s. Not sure how it worked prior to that. I didn't start using BBS's until shortly after the breakup happened.
Not just HW and bandwidth, it's the software too.
File transfers were probably done via the XModem protocol, which did error checking only via a weak checksum, not even a CRC. Over a large file, the chances of corruption somewhere were dismaying.
And these here were text files, which should be hugely compressible. But at this point in history, compression algorithms were still in their infancy. I don't recall encountering ARC until the late 80s. So you'd be transmitting rather more than you needed to in the first place.
Those of us with Apple ]['s and Novation Apple Cat's could chat while transferring files.
also, memory dumpers that can rebase an exe from memory given the original entry point