Jason Scott's Weblog
When Brewster hired me in 2011, he had the foresight to recognize I’d spread in many directions once I was under the auspiciousness of the Internet Archive, but he definitely had one overarching goal with my employment. Paraphrasing, it was this: the Archive had done very well with books, music, visual items, and of course [...]
From my posting on the TOSEC development forum: Hello, everyone. My name is Jason Scott, and my position is “free-range Archivist” at the Internet Archive (archive.org). I’m here as a private individual, and not as a spokesman for the Archive in any way. I’ve been working there for about two years and have used them [...]
Been working a long time towards this moment. A lot of good people working on a lot of good code, and helping each other towards this insane goal. JSMESS is in open beta. Four game consoles and one computer are supported. Many more are coming. I first postulated this was possible in October of 2011, [...]
As you might harken back, I announced two things last year: that November was “Just Solve the Problem Month”, and that the first “problem” to solve was “File Formats”. I even had a logo! Well, let’s quickly discuss what’s happened since the month came to a close. Most notably, we got a bunch of data on [...]
I wrote an entry a while ago about a crazy idea called The Charge of the Scan Brigade. The idea was simple: use some of the downtime in the Internet Archive SF offices to have a line of volunteers do scanning of computer history and other material on the Scribe scanners Internet Archive uses. In [...]
My buddy Aaron Swartz hung himself on Friday. Try to imagine a ball of energy, whipping around, looking for somewhere to strike, somewhere to hit, somewhere to find a stopping point or grand finale. Ultimately, just coming to a standstill because there’s just no real place to end up – a miserable standstill. That’s [...]
Everybody needs a new year’s resolution. Most of them also need to follow through. I am going to try both. It’s a simple one, too: “By the end of 2013, change online computer history forever.” I’ve been working at the Internet Archive for nearly two years now, every day better than the last, with memories [...]
I’m putting this here to get some attention. There’s a documentary in production, or which was in production, which was a mini series about all things 8-bit consoles and computers. It’s called “8 Bit Generation”. It has trailers up. The trailers are fairly incredible. These trailers are so nice looking, so well shot, so [...]
The short form of this post is that I and Archive Team would like to ask you to donate money to the Internet Archive. During the month of December, they’ve got a 3-1 matching partner, which means that every dollar you donate results in $4 going to the Internet Archive’s funds. That is unbeatable and [...]
While doing some preliminary interview footage for the Arcade Documentary project, I asked a bunch of teenagers what most surprised them at the MAGFest pop-up arcade, where dozens of games of all stripe were right there ready to be played. To a person, it was one thing: The vector monitor on Asteroids. If you see [...]