Jason Scott's Weblog
As per my usual methodology, I’ll be attending the DEFCON hacking and security conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, starting this upcoming Wednesday and going through to Sunday. With a couple exceptions, I’ve been there every year since 1999, so it’s kind of a thing I do. I also happen to love Las Vegas, so going […]
It occurs to me that some people who read my weblog might not know my twitter feed. I’ve been there for years, but it doesn’t come up here all that much. Perhaps not surprisingly, the feed’s name is @textfiles. I’m rangy, weird, abrasive, occasionally helpful and informative. You know, like usual. Check it out.
Someone has to break it to you, and that person is me. It’s over. You waited too long. You procrastinated or made excuses or otherwise didn’t think about it or care. You didn’t do anything and it’s too late now. I’m talking about Floppy Disks. And I mean the five-and-a-quarter (5 1/4″) floppy disks that […]
I’ve been a little busy, doing a little travelling for the summer. When I get back home this weekend, I’ll be kicking things into full gear with my work with Archive Team, Archive.org, GDC, and other projects. But let me mention a few things worth going into that I did while globetrotting. The Arcade Manuals […]
OK, now that I’ve gone pro with the archiving and I’ve been at it pretty hardcore for a few months, my programmer brain has kicked in and I’m trying to find inefficiencies and kill them so we end up with a ton of cool stuff online. I already know what I am and what I’m […]
Here’s the deal. Like a lot of other people, I incurred some huge debt in the last 5-6 years, which then started to expand under the weight of compound interest, and which I then spent a lot of time on the phone negotiating to minimal interest and reasonable payoffs over time. It has been going […]
So the initial experiment with Chuck Benton turns out to have been pretty successful – the resulting video is clear, clean, well-mic’d, and provides you pretty much all the relevant statements on the subject of GET LAMP-related ideas. Someone mentioned a cut-off here and there, and unfortunately it’s been too many years to know why […]
During the shooting of the GET LAMP documentary, I generated what appears to be my stylistic mass of footage – over 120 hours of people talking about text adventures, early home computer software industry, inter-company politics, and a range of things about writing interactively. It was a huge range of subjects and of course only […]
If it’s not obvious already, one of the major parts of my work with the Internet Archive involves going after those very subjects, items and collections that would fit perfectly within its hallowed walls but which nobody with the items, or archive.org, has made the connection. I’m the connection. And I’m connecting. A lot of […]
As someone who is a computer historian and is into the whole data archival and preservation area, I thought you might be able to answer this question. We have some data, including precious family audio recordings from years ago, which we are currently keeping on several hard drives. If all copies were lost, this data […]