ASCII by Jason Scott

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About Jason Scott


JASON SCOTT SADOFSKY AND THE CASE OF THE ERRANT BIOGRAPHY


Jason Scott Sadofsky was born on September 13, 1970 to two very nice people who got along for a while and then not so much. Things get fuzzy for a while in there, but he definitely lived in a variety of homes in the Putnam and Westchester Counties in New York State and in various towns surrounding Boston, Massachusetts, which is where he’s located currently.

His main impetus for coming to Boston was to attend Emerson College (Class of 1992), graduating with a “Mass Communications – Film” degree. (Resultant GPA: 2.1)

He spent 6 years as a temp worker until his mid-20s, when he spent two years in the video game industry (first at a company called Psygnosis and later at a start-up called Focus Studios) before realizing his destiny and going into UNIX administration.

When not working his day jobs, Jason started a failed Internet Service Provider called COW.NET (Boston’s only bovine-themed Internet Service Provider) and ran an online multi-user game and social space called TinyTIM (which continues to run, long after he retired in 2000 after ten years co-helming the place).

For three years, Jason worked summer weekends as the “Cow Guy of Harvard Square”, drawing caricatures for money until a concerted effort by political forces removed “vendors”, which apparently included a guy in a cow suit drawing people wrong.

In 1998 he started a website called TEXTFILES.COM whose original mission was to make available the thousands of BBS textfiles he’d collected in his youth, but which has now expanded greatly in all directions of computer history. Over the last decade the site has been host to millions of visitors and used frequently as a historical reference and lazy-day pastime. The collection, combined with all of its sub-sections, consists of over a terabyte of data.

In 2001, Jason began production on a video documentary about dial-up Bulletin Board Systems which was named simply “BBS: The Documentary”. Thousands of miles of travel, two hundred interviews, and 4 years later the film was released as a 5.5 hour mini-series on three DVDs.

In 2005, production began on two more documentaries: GET LAMP, a documentary about text adventures and the people/companies who created/create them, and ARCADE, a documentary about places of coin-operated
entertainment.



2 Comments

  1. […] there would be something inherently hilarious in his winning. It would be encumbent upon myself and Fatty Food Guy to provide a proper reward for all this, and while the jury is still out on what that will be, we […]

  2. […] Returning with a swag bag stocked with munchies and drinks for the rest of the day, I wandered around the con on my own for a while, taking in the amazing building and just generally feeling slackjawed by how much fun I was having.  Then something completely unexpected happened.  During the lunch break, I wandered out into the street just as Brewster was walking by…flanked by Chris Poole and Jason Scott. […]

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