ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Archive for the ‘Internet Archive’ Category

Archivebot and Automatic Betterment —

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 […]

What 2016 Is —

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 […]

The Rest of the Infocom Cabinet —

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 […]

A Cabinet of Infocom Curiousities —

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 […]

Archiving 3,500 Hours of Stupid —

The title has little context, which I think is appropriate. One of my friends in high school insisted, nay, demanded that I listen to an album called A BIG 10-8 PLACE, which was either about or by something called Negativland, which I didn’t have a clue as to what that could mean, and before I could really absorb that, I […]

The Internet Archive Telethon —

I’ve been given permission to go ahead and schedule an Internet Archive Telethon to allow us to have a gosh-darn-it actual showcase at the amazing space that is the San Francisco headquarters. My goal, humble as always, is to try and raise a million dollars for the Archive in a weekend. To do this, there will be […]

An Invitation into the Stacks —

I’m conducting an experiment in volunteerism with the Internet Archive. It’s unofficial and seriously an experiment. Let’s be clear about that. We have a Slack server running, and so I’ve set up a channel, called “Stacks”, which people can be invited to and which they can sit in, discussing volunteering opportunities or ideas for projects […]

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 […]