Jason Scott's Weblog
Sometimes, when I’m feeling down or depressed, I cheer myself up the way that most people would: by scanning in 20-year-old dot-matrix printouts, proofreading the resulting textfile for accuracy to the original, and then posting it for the world. When I was calling BBSes in the early 1980s, I sometimes would print out the stuff […]
I tried to use other means, but the name is in too much use and database searches don’t really help me lock things down. So here we go. It shouldn’t be a big surprise that I am a Hell Roommate. Within a short time you figure out that you made a really bad mistake renting […]
The more I collect stuff, and at this point I am collecting a virtual tidal wave of stuff, the more I am realizing how important the role of a guide is. There are a lot of good people in this world, doing a lot of good work collecting stuff. And by “a lot”, I mean […]
Like any relatively sketchy activity, you learn “the rules” either by osmosis, logic, or the hard way. Your buddies involved in the same stuff as you will happily give you helpful advice, but they’re often just grasping into the same darkness as you. Such was the case with Phone Phreaking, which required the use of […]
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 […]