Jason Scott's Weblog
People occasionally ask why I don’t run my own blog or my own BBS or message bases on textfiles.com. My answer, in a basic sense, is I don’t have the time to run things correctly, as I think it should be. To ask me what my definition of “should be” is gets to the heart […]
Instead of filling up this bar with some very long, very intensive descriptions of events and things that not everyone would have an interest in, let me quickly give you a handful of informational tokens, flush with links and left as an exercise to learn about if it interests you. PLATO. It doesn’t stand for […]
There’s the usual layer of nostalgia: you played an Atari game or two or perhaps owned a 2600 and some cartridges. Then there’s the layer below: you check on ebay for cartridges and collect them, maybe even pick up the occasional full-sized game to burn through some ready cash. And there’s a layer beyond that, […]
By request, I’m going to write a little bit about the concept of “Cracking”. Like any good computer-related term, it has gone through many different meanings, all of them hotly fought over in certain tiny corners. Many of these uses are correct, as long as you take into consideration the time being spoken of. In […]
A significant period of time before a pissed-off Richard Stallman arc-welded politics into programming, for-pay and for-free software makers co-existed relatively peacefully. The general needs for each type of computer user were handled by their type of company or individual. There were the occasional blips here and there, but the type of people who were […]
My previous discussion of experiences with Psygnosis neglected to mention Henk Nieborg. By the 1990’s, Psygnosis was generally more like a record company bringing in outside talent rather than a software house producing everything from within. This meant that there were a bunch of people who would just grind away at a game for a […]
One of the big responses out of people when they visit my historical sites are the incredulity that the data still exists at all. Certainly, that was my own response when Google Groups started pulling in data from 1982, and when I first stumbled upon the ever-fluctuating Asimov Archive of Apple II disk images. (I’ll […]
For about a year in 1994 I had the pleasure of working for a video game company called Psygnosis, based in Liverpool but with offices all around, including Cambridge, MA. I was called in for a temp job, and the temp job was doing tech support for Psygnosis. I worked with a fellow named Chris […]
The documentary has made me do an awful lot of research, not just on hardware and events, but on people as well. Along the way I’ve met and researched a lot of interesting people, but even better yet, I’ve researched people I thought were interesting and found that, in fact, they’re even more interesting and […]
The most interesting statement I get from people when they tell me about their history is how “it’s all gone now” and “everything is different now”. I find it interesting because it’s entirely untrue, but it belies another related issue: finding content, and finding relevant content. My secret trick for dealing with search engines is […]