ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Author Archive

Commodork Comes Home —

I have become a vendor of Commodork, the book by Rob “Flack” O’Hara. Here’s my inventory: I’ve gone on the record about how I liked this book, which has the occasional rough edges but is as honest and fun as the BBS days that it comes from. Flack covers his teenage years and the love […]

When the BBS Broke Free —

It’s nearly 20 years since a harbinger of the BBS’s future made itself known. Time for a recap. I think there’s two levels to discussing something historical: compiling a general overview of an event that may have slipped by and is in need of attention, which is easier in today’s info-soaked world, and then a […]

But It Is Obvious —

A basic concept worth mentioning, even if it means a text dump and some commentary. So, the anthrax letters of 2001, the investigative team of which pursued one man, until he was found innocent. Remember that? After he was found innocent, the FBI pursued another individual, who during the investigation committed suicide. There’s an article […]

CD.TEXTFILES.COM gets subdirectories —

So I turned around and realized that CD.TEXTFILES.COM has over 400 CD-ROMs on it. That’s pretty crazy. I remember a few days that felt like they’d never end where I was shoving CD-ROM after CD-ROM into drives, making ISOs, extracting information from them. But I had no idea that over the years I’d gotten it […]

Ten Years of Textfiles —

To celebrate a decade of textfiles.com, I’ve created a sub-site called the Ten Years of Textfiles. It’s basically a series of small essays with memories, thoughts, artifacts, photos and links of the textfiles.com story (and my own as well). Please pass it around and let people know about it, if you have a chance. Thanks.

Computer Camp Love —

A buddy of mine, Quag7, mentioned the existence of this rather interesting retro-themed music video by a band named “Datarock”: “Computer Camp Love”. As it turns out this song and its video are online at MTVmusic.com, a site that does what MTV most certainly does not do, which is dependably play music videos. Here’s the […]

Pretty and Pathetic —

A few thoughts on interfaces and completeness. My archives are by no means growing smaller – thanks to the efforts of people and my own collecting tendencies, tons of stuff ends up joining the textfiles.com site every month, mostly in the CD Shareware, Artscene and Audio collections. I am still sent BBS Lists going back […]

A Life in by 3 and out by 11 —

Shooting a documentary means doing some traveling. If your subject is particularly diverse or has a lot of locations where people are living, it can mean a ton of traveling. And inevitably, you will run out of friends you know and you will be staying in a hotel. And by hotel I mean a lot […]