ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Archive for the ‘computer history’ Category

Someone’s Been Talking —

This year I’ve been doing many, many more presentations and conferences than I would normally do – I guess this whole “save the digital planet” thing has taken off. Along with all the presentations have come travel and trying to re-adjust my life so I can do the majority of what I do from anywhere […]

Javascript Hero: The New Batch —

Dormant while my attention was focused on a few other matters, the Javascript MESS Project is coming back. And if you are ready, willing, and a coder, we need your help. If you don’t know what the Javascript MESS Project is, I wrote entries here and here about it. Oh, and here and here. I […]

Let’s Just Solve the Problem Month —

I had really good success when I put out the call for the Archive Team, so let’s try that again, with an entirely new idea. I would like to declare November 2012 the very first Let’s Just Solve the Problem Month. Here’s how it works, and what problem I want to solve. As that sexy […]

The GET LAMP Raw Interview Flood —

When you overshoot your documentaries as much as I do, you end up with a lot of perfectly good, probably movie-worthy footage that just doesn’t make it into the final cut. When I edit down the dozens of hours of interviews, I have thousands of clips of people saying on-topic, coherent things, all labelled, and […]

UNDO DEL IUMA —

The best projects cause a lot of people to shrug or go “oh, that’s nice” and then a much smaller percentage of people to drop whatever they’re carrying and stagger forward in disbelief. Here’s one of those. For some people, just bringing up the phrase “The Internet Underground Music Archive”, or “IUMA”, summons memories of […]

One Year Update: Jason and the Internet Archive —

I officially started work at the Internet Archive over a year ago. Let’s remove any tension – it has been a fantastic year, where I have gotten more done in the way of preservation and computer history work than my entire previous 40 years combined. Internet Archive seems to like me, I really like them, […]

Javascript Hero: Well, That Was Fast. —

So, last year I had this dream to help encouraging the porting of MESS (the Multi-Emulator Super System) to Javascript. We used a Colecovision emulator in the system because MESS had a compilation option to do just that system (called mess-tiny) so we could focus on the main problems. We did it, and this past […]

Javascript Hero: Success / Your Big Moment —

The Javascript MESS project, where we’re porting MESS to Javascript, is now chugging along very nicely. The time for action is now. I’m very excited! This is where you get to pitch in, in a variety of ways. Let me state the goal again: take the MESS project, which is a massive open-sourced effort to […]

Taking the Sears Time Machine for a Test Drive —

I tried one of those experiments, where a lot of people know something might work, but nobody wants to put down the bucks to see if it will. So I decided to go for it. Sears, that venerable chain of mail catalogs-turned-stores-turned-K-Mart-Meal, has a Parts Direct website where, in theory, you can buy anything they ever […]

Javascript Hero: A Hero Appears —

Last October, I gave a call to arms on this very weblog to help port MESS to Javascript. Five months later, I want to share a working protoype. So, with the caveat of it only working in the Google Chrome browser, of it only showing you a single Colecovision cartridge, and of it having no […]