ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Archive for the ‘computer history’ Category

The Delight of Fuzzy Memory —

Back in the mid 1990s, when the Emulation Craze really kicked in and before MAME flattened the playing field once and for all, we had a lot of emulators out there. Some were single-purpose: they emulated a single video game, and generally very well. Others were multi-machine, usually focusing on a set of games that […]

Super Mario Presentation 64 —

For two weeks, I was off the air as far as this weblog was concerned. Oh, but have no fear, readers… have no fear at all. I’ve been generating what might be called a “lot of content”. Today’s bit is just the beginning. I am just back from Blockparty at Notacon, the 3rd edition, which […]

Results of Commo-Doc Bundle Experiment —

Last November, I decided to buy a stack of Rob O’Hara’s Commodork book, which I had reviewed positively a couple years earlier. I bought 50 copies, had Rob autograph each, and have maintained the stack here since, including it as part of a bundle on the BBS Documentary order page. So here we are, five […]

Opinion Spectrum Collapse Disorder —

During the presentation I gave at ROFLthing this past January about Sockington, I pulled out a term from the air to describe something I’ve been seeing in action lately.  Here’s what the slide looked like, courtesy of Scott Beale of Laughingsquid: What’s been really interesting for me in the past 20 years or so is […]

Racing the Beam —

Think of all the time I’m going to save you. Instead of writing a massive amount of flowery language about Racing the Beam, the new book co-authored by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, I am going to nail it right down to whether you will want or not want this book based on one section. […]

The Thick of It: Computer Shopper —

The article that informed me was very upbeat about it, but the fact remains: Computer Shopper is going out of print.  In the contemporary era, “going out of print” doesn’t always mean “died”; with the website now as valid a location for publication as anything else, the lack of a print component merely means dead […]

Goodbye to the Bandwidth Dragon —

In 2003, having recently bought a house, I achieved a weird little dream of sorts: I had a T-1 line installed into my basement. With it came shelves of servers, a hub that blinked menacingly, and a lordship/dominion over 32 of my very own static IP addresses. This was a good time. Previously, I’d only […]

The Millbrook Round Table —

My oldest friend, Chris Orcutt, went into his local hangout, the diner of his town of Millbrook, NY, and discovered that the local paper was closing its doors. Chris had worked on that paper over a decade before, as a true newspaper man, for a period of time, so it had a particular and personal […]

What Is BBS? —

From: King Jables To: Jason Scott Subject: BBS I know that you’ll probably think think that I am a complete imbeceil for asking this, but I keep seeing the abbreviation “BBS” on your website. What exactly was a “BBS”, and why should the advent of the internet have signalled it’s demise? I mean, if people […]