ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Archive for the ‘computer history’ Category

In Realtime: It Is Done —

When I can feel my face again, and after I finish cleaning up my untouched-for-a-week life up in New York, I will sit down and write a proper Post-mortem of everything, but here’s the high level news.   The goal, as you might recall, was to go into a closing warehouse of manuals, take as […]

In Realtime: Saving 25,000 Manuals —

Earlier this year, a number of kind folks told me that an esteemed seller of manuals was going to be getting out of the business. I lamented but didn’t give it much thought. As the months went on, I eventually got into contact with them, and they with me, and we discussed a possible contingency […]

MAME and the New Emulation Reality —

I’m sorry all my weblog entries seem to be variations of emulation, Internet Archive, Archive Team and Vintage Computing, but that’s kind of all my life is right now anyway. (I’m also editing documentaries, but that’s even less informative. HEY UPDATE FOLKS I AM EDITING DOCUMENTARIES.) Time to talk about MAME. Like surfing, ventriloquism, or […]

A Piece of Apple II History Cracks Open —

The world of Apple II “cracking” has always held an interesting fascination for me – the thinking involved, the magic of tracing programs, and of course the “crack screens” that pirates would add to declare their victory. (Here’s a massive gallery of them that I collected.) I interviewed long-retired Apple II crackers for the BBS […]

Yes, I Want Your Goddamn AOL CDs —

Yes, yes I do. As you might expect, someone who does a lot of something (collecting) like I do, in a pretty public fashion, tends to get some pretty shiny-polished chestnuts tossed over the fence. The two winners, by a landslide, are: “_______ 8″ floppies” (a whole variety of statements, from people having them to […]

Behold the Emularity —

When, exactly, is the right time to introduce some new program or technology? What if, as is often the case, it is not quite 100% done or fully tested? Do you hold back until every corner has been sanded, and every surface sanded to a shine? Or do you put it out, splinters and smelling […]

Lazy Game Reviews: The Lazier Response —

In January of 2015, Lazy Game Reviews, a site dedicated to reviews of retro and historic video games (especially of the DOS stripe), reviewed the Internet Archive’s MS-DOS Games Collection that was making a bit of news back then. ss It was…. mixed. Here’s a link to the video of the review. I didn’t see […]

Embed-able Computers are a Thing. —

This either works for you or it doesn’t. If it works, a copy of Burgertime for DOS is now in your browser, clickable from my entry. If it doesn’t… well, no Burgertime for you. (Unless you visit the page.) There’s a “share this” link in the new archive.org interface for sharing these in-browser emulations in […]

Scan, No Scan (and a Cube in the mix) —

This week has been spent sorting through the Information Cube, that insane 40x8x8 shipping container in my back yard, and packing up magazines by the thousand to go away. The reason this is happening is because of an arrangement I made last year, with the Strong Museum of Play (and is also the International Center […]