ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Archive for the ‘computer history’ Category

A Stack of Paper —

In the mail, from Ross Kerr (who has been sending me similar packages), came a small stack of Computerworld, a newspaper-style trade publication covering all aspects of computer technology. This particular stack is from 1987. Some are in not so great shape and some are pristine. They’re obviously ones that were sent to a business, […]

Conversation With a Dead Guy —

OK, so because I wrote some stuff about my opinion about black-box shared resources and its consequence on data sustainability, I have gotten a lot of attention from a lot of people, some positive and some negative. We’ll set the positives aside, and most of the negatives, as well. Many negatives are from people who confused […]

Team Archive is GO —

Registered, set up, and now live, ARCHIVETEAM.ORG is a wiki dedicated to saving data, assembling mirroring or retrieval efforts, and providing simple links to methodologies of archiving data. Think of it as a really profane, rough and tumble version of a library sciences convention. If you are suddenly filled with a sense of outrage or […]

Datapocalypso! —

Well, nothing like coming back from a holiday trip to find yourself slashdotted. Actually, there’s really nothing like finding yourself slashdotted back in 2001. Nowadays, not so much; a mere six thousand visitors over a couple days with a few more crawling in days after that.  Web servers have gotten pretty good at what they do […]

Halfway —

Hello distance learning consultants! I’m looking forward to providing telepractice services for your students. I’m an experienced SLP who uses software and apps to increase the intensity of therapy without driving up the cost. Send the Contract Details to your Accounting Department in One Click After you fill this in, you will automatically get a […]

RADIOSHACKCATALOGS.COM —

A lot of people are telling me about radioshackcatalogs.com, which purports to be an archive of the yearly catalogs put out by Radio Shack, a chain of electronics stores (now not quite so much) dating back to 1921. (You can read an excellent history of this store chain on the official Radio Shack Corporation Site.) […]

The Age of Reason: An Apple II BBS —

From: Gene Buckle To: jason@textfiles.com Subject: Maniac IIe… Telnet to The Age of Reason – 199.254.199.64. Apple IIe running GBBS Pro v1.3j and the Land of Spur game from Dura Eurpos. The _only_ of either one running on the whole fraking planet. 🙂 Gene Buckle’s one of my secret weapons in the fight to save […]

GET LAMP Milestone Reached —

The question I am asked the most, on a nearly daily basis, regards GET LAMP, my text adventure documentary. How is it going? Is it out? Can I buy it? Why haven’t you finished it? Are you still doing it? Understandable, because the website has remained mum for most of 2008. My fault. It’s one […]

The Amnesia Manuscript —

As mentioned in a rather recent weblog entry, a collector has gotten their hands on both original packaging and the manuscript for a game by the late Thomas Disch called “Amnesia“. This game, released in 1985, was a text adventure featuring a player waking up with no memory of who they are and the resulting […]

Amnesia, Forgotten and Remembered —

Within the context of text adventure history, this is relatively big news. From: Stephane Racle Subject: Amnesia Not sure if anyone here is a fan of “Amnesia”, the text adventure that was written by Thomas M. Disch and released by Electronic Arts in the mid-1980s, but I recently acquired a number of interesting items related […]