ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Archive for May, 2010

PLATO’s Retreat —

So part of this is let you know of the PLATO 50th Anniversary Celebration at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. It’s June 2-3rd. If you have the ability to get out there to it and you have the slightest interest in computer history, you will want to go to this. It all […]

BBS Documentary IMDB Entry Improved —

Just wanted to mention that the BBS Documentary IMDB Entry now has another 100 names added to it. Man, did I interview a lot of people. Only a few people appear in my film as well as others, so I added a metric ton of entirely new people to their database, and that takes a […]

Information Cube Status —

The Information Cube, the new home of the TEXTFILES.COM Archives and a direct result of the Sabbatical funding I received last year, is coming along nicely. I learned a lot about what crates and storage boxes work and do not work, I can say that – I’ve found which collapse under their own weight, which […]

Buffing up the BBS Documentary IMDB Entry —

Just worked a little on one of those “in the attic” projects – adding interviewees to the cast list for the BBS Documentary IMDB Entry. If you’ve never worked with IMDB’s interface for adding or correcting details, it’s very weird to say the least.  And if you’re working in the world of Wikis and think […]

DistriWiki: A Proposal —

People, it’s time. Actually, it was time probably 5 years ago, but better late than never. If you believe Clay Shirky, we can just keep burning energy nearly forever in terms of collaboration energy, but let us not waste too much more than we have, can we? It’s like how bananas used to taste different […]

Shorn —

So, I recently got a slight hair reduction: I mention this for two reasons: A lot of people have only known me in the past 5 years or less, and have never known a time where I didn’t have some level of hair or goatee. I don’t want to be refused entry for the time […]

Computer Beach Party … PART TWO —

Stuff happens for a reason; that’s what I was again reminded of after a 40 minute conversation with Gary Troy, director of Computer Beach Party. When we last left this story, I’d seen a terrible film at the Found Footage Festival. Since I’m the Computer History Guy, I wanted to get the story behind it. In […]

Computer Beach Party … PART ONE —

I like to think that when people funded my sabbatical, this was the sort of thing they wanted. During ROFLcon, there was a showing at the local movie theater of a rather rare, rather bizarre little computer film.  I’d have thought I’d seen most films with computers in them.  Or, at least, heard of them. […]

ROFLCON: Fidonet and Tom Jennings —

It’s my own unfair bias, but my preferential talks for ROFLcon center around history. Usually, it’s me up on stage with those guys. Sometimes, though, it’s not, and in one other case during the event, there was a pretty amazing panel that took place that I wanted to highlight. There were plenty of other great […]