Jason Scott's Weblog
I’m sorry all my weblog entries seem to be variations of emulation, Internet Archive, Archive Team and Vintage Computing, but that’s kind of all my life is right now anyway. (I’m also editing documentaries, but that’s even less informative. HEY UPDATE FOLKS I AM EDITING DOCUMENTARIES.) Time to talk about MAME. Like surfing, ventriloquism, or […]
A little over a month ago, I cooked up a grandiose plan with the Archive Team to back up the Internet Archive, and discussed what that might entail and how one might approach it. How’s that thing going, anyway? Remarkably Well would be the best description. The working group (and let’s be clear – I’m […]
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, 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 […]
No project is complete without a shirt, and I helped design one for all the emulation going on at the Internet Archive. (My co-worker Jeff Kaplan did the actual mouse-to-screen effort after I sketched out what I was looking for and pointed to the right fonts to use.) Entitled GAME NOT OVER!, these shirts are […]
One of the most inquisitive and detail-oriented members of Archive Team, godane, asked after a file he’d found on the Internet Archive that had been uploaded by my boss, Brewster Kahle, in 2005. Simply called “untitled”, with a collection of seemingly-randomized metadata, this 4 gigabyte video file had been viewed a handful of times (which […]
It’s inevitable that Archive Team would try to archive the hand that archives it. We dump a lot of data into the Internet Archive – hundreds of gigabytes a day. And the Archive itself has a goodly amount of petabytes in its stacks. Thanks to a series of articles and appearances, the Archive’s getting some […]
When, exactly, is the right time to introduce some new program or technology? What if, as is often the case, it is not quite 100% done or fully tested? Do you hold back until every corner has been sanded, and every surface sanded to a shine? Or do you put it out, splinters and smelling […]
In January of 2015, Lazy Game Reviews, a site dedicated to reviews of retro and historic video games (especially of the DOS stripe), reviewed the Internet Archive’s MS-DOS Games Collection that was making a bit of news back then. ss It was…. mixed. Here’s a link to the video of the review. I didn’t see […]
Here’s what Internet Archive did really well for a decade and a half: provide old webpages, and give fast and simple access to millions of items ranging across all kinds of media. Here’s what it did not do well: change the website. For years and years, the site looked very much the same. You can […]