Jason Scott's Weblog
I spent a week in London at the beginning of this month. This contributed to lack of updates here and a few other things being pushed temporarily aside. But I’m back, I took a lot of photos, and I had a very good time. I never left the confines of London, so I don’t consider […]
Like a lot of teenagers, I had voicemail. That is, like a lot of teenagers now. But I had voicemail in 1984. This came about because a kind soul posted a phone number to a voice mail system in Washington DC. I knew it was Washington DC because the area code was 202 and by […]
Some time ago, I talked about a theater on the way out, in an entry called The Little Theater. I talked about how they didn’t own their property, didn’t have a lobby to speak of, had basically taken the idea they were a utility and then turned around and demanded a million dollars from the […]
I suppose if you’d held me down in my early teens, I’d have happily called myself a “Phone Phreak”. However, a lot of that was because if you scoped around the world of BBSes and Textfiles at the time, people who called themselves Phone Phreaks had the coolest attitude, textfiles, and history. While “Hackers” were […]
I’ve been mostly concentrating on the now, on the stuff I’m scanning and the work on the documentaries. Fun, but I think people liked it more when I addressed history and wrote essays. To get back to that, I will be adding three essays about phones. One will be called SECURITY, one called THE OFFICE, […]
Without wasting everyone’s time by doing a “weblog” entry that in fact is just a “go here” entry, let me keep it short and sweet about this site: http://www.rt2.us This is a webpage regarding a long-ago BBS/Modem-Based site called “The Houston Freelancin’ Roundtable”. You can read up about what it is, browse old printouts, see […]
I made a nice little addition to DIGITIZE.TEXTFILES.COM: The 1980 Coleco Catalog. If you don’t remember getting a Coleco catalog in the mail at some point, don’t be worried. This particular catalog went out specifically to stores or purchasers for chains. It’s directed toward people who buy by the box or the truckload, and so […]
Isn’t that how it always is? I am going to be in London for a week doing interviews for my documentary and also speaking at a convention (about Wikipedia, this time), and I realize the time I’m going exactly matches a real incredible chiptune festival in New York City: BLIPFESTIVAL.ORG This is fly-to-NY-and-rent-a-hotel worthy. Days […]
Simon of Legaltorrents (and a bunch of other cool stuff) asked me if it was OK to put an episode of the BBS Documentary up on his website of cool crap to download. How could I say no, both by license and wish? The thing is licensed so that he could put it up without […]
I got a mail just this week: “So, I have a collection of a few hundred megs of MP3s of voice mailboxes run by hackers in 1990. Do you have any suggestions on who I should give them to or what to do with them?” Why yes, I said. yes I do. Only one or […]