Jason Scott's Weblog
It seemed like a good idea at the time. As I was collecting textfiles and other artifacts from the BBS era and beyond, I started to go after the logical next step: audio recordings and “art scene” creations. In the case of audio, it started with conferences from the 1990s and voicemail recordings, but it […]
I’ve been watching an awful lot of documentaries for the past couple of years, mostly out of a self-interest, but also because I tend to like them. I especially like documentaries where the subject matter is not so self-evident, like people who play lots of online games or The Fisher-Price Pixelvision Camera or people who […]
“Bottom line, I made a mistake: I thought you were approaching this BBS documentary project as a scholar and a historian would. In my own work I’ve found that sometimes the most interesting threads uncovered in any history are not the obvious ones that everybody knows about, but the non-obvious ones, the exceptions to the […]
Imagine my surprise when I found the following auctions up on Ebay (they’ll disappear soon, like all truly fly-by-night operations and deals): Old School BBS Files Volume 1 (15,000+ files) Old School BBS Files Volume 2 (25,000 files) Old School BBS Files All (52,000+ files) Essentially, they’re selling a copy of textfiles.com for somewhere between […]
It was inevitable that the BBS Documentary would need a sizeable appendix of information and related subjects that came up during the production but likely won’t be in the final “films”. Either I won’t have interviews to accompany them, or they’re too hard to get right, or another reason. As a result, there’s now a […]
Date: Sat, 17 Apr 2004 11:39:25 -0500 From: “dC :: Contact Desk” To: ascii@textfiles.com Subject: Good of History? Stupid and BORING Mr. Scott: I was recently forwarded a link to https://ascii.textfiles.com/ and a particular article was brought to my attention. First and foremost, I would like to apologize for the rather unsettling approach by one […]
Sketch> Hello! tuxie> oO Sketch> Is someone who runs depthcore here? depthCORE> Hello. Sketch> Hello! Sketch> I run a site called artscene.textfiles.com. I work with Rad Man of ACiD and a few other folks and try to collect together as many “art packs” as I can, as well as other art scenes. Is there any […]
This essay is not much about textfiles at all, though perhaps it’s entirely about textfiles. My work on my sites and documentary stem from several major drives: The desire to save a history I’m afraid is disappearing, the need to explain this history to folks who did not live through or personally experience the events […]
In a move to allow people who are interested in my BBS Documentary to get news about it in a timely fashion without constantly hitting the website, I will be cross-posting news stories from the BBS Documentary site on this weblog. Updates happen once a month or less, so I don’t expect it to be […]
Sometimes, there are aspects of history that are so obscure, so unusual, that they are forgotten even by people who were a part of that history. In the sphere of technology, you will often have the case of people being faced with a problem so easily overcome in later years that the fact that the […]