Jason Scott's Weblog
One of the most successful (and ongoing) projects that Archive Team has done is Archivebot. It’s a crowdsourced archiving operation that goes after anything that needs archiving, be it webpages, tweets, videos and other online scrapings, and allows them all to be captured in a competent, useful manner, 24/7. It has grown over the years and is […]
The joke, which I used in a lot of introductory speeches about the Internet Archive Software Collection, was that we are the largest collection of downloadable software on the planet, period. Find us a bigger one, and we’ll download it and add it. The reason I can make that declaration is because the first few […]
As is usually the case, my need to get things done means this weblog does not get anything updated on it. I see the last time I posted was in November, and here we are at the strike-out of the new 2016 year. 18 years of running TEXTFILES.COM! Five years at the Internet Archive! And […]
With the release of MAME/MESS 0.168 today, JSMESS achieved something special and something final: Irrelevancy. Through the work of JSMESS team member DopefishJustin and MAME/MESS developer Micko, assisted by a number of other contributed factors by both teams, per-driver compilation of MAME/MESS into Emscripten-converted Javascript just “happens” now. It’s one of the features built into MAME/MESS, […]
Here’s an update on the Infocom Cabinet, with a side order of ethical debate. I’ve now dumped the balance of materials I have around into the Infocom Cabinet collection on the Internet Archive. There’s some scatterings left on my hard drives, but they are either 100% personal (think: pay stubs and employee evaluations) or they’re […]
This is big news, in the realm of game design studies. During the production of GET LAMP, I spent a lot of time digitizing or photographing all sorts of artifacts and documents related to Interactive Fiction and text adventures. This included books, advertisements, printouts, and various ephemera that various players or programmers had lying around […]
Of the barrage of advice the world was prepared to give me from the vantage point of the Internet, one unique bit of advice came from a long-time collector and rescuer of older computer documentation and equipment. It’s definitely the all-around best advice, and was, in fact, truly unique: nobody else brought it up. The […]
I know it’s been announcement city over here for the past week and a half. Here’s the last piece in the puzzle: trying to solve the biggest looming problem for online libraries and archives. So, people get it: When items are online, they become infinitely more useful. They can transfer instantly, they can be viewed […]
I’m just keeping the theme with the title. Future postings will be less obscure. This is a wrap up and list of conclusions after this grand experiment. And an announcement. But first things first. A LITTLE BIT ABOUT WARNING TIME. In my inbox, going back over a year (and going back years in my mail […]
As the story of the saved manuals gained steam, a greater audience of people began to be aware of it. Once you get past a few thousand, people start showing up who…. don’t forward the conversation. I just wanted to talk a little bit about that situation of the modern era, since I consider it one of […]