Jason Scott's Weblog
On the post I did about Floppy Disks, that’s gotten a lot of attention in its own right, there was a comment the weblog software marked as suspicious, and possible spam. The content itself was rather innocuous and in theme: I will always keep a few floppies and a 3.5 inch drive. Can’t install older […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
A while ago, I mentioned that I had taken over editing of the Two Hands Project, a documentary about Hackerspaces that had been filmed in September of 2009. This was met with excitement from all sides, both the original filmmakers and from myself, because editing is lots of fun. I dumped all the tapes from […]
Life working as an archivist for The Internet Archive has been going fantabulous, thanks for asking. I start to feel like one of those individuals tweeting or writing about “being in an amazing environment working with great people on world-changing projects”, except in fact I am not working in some primary-color-and-convenient-free-coffee cube farm that is […]
Hello Jason, I’ve recently learned of your amazing archiving efforts and I wanted to thank you for all that you have done for the internet community. You’ve really got me thinking more than I had before about the fragile nature of personal data and indeed so much of the personal expression ordinary people output every […]