Jason Scott's Weblog
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 […]
Like most people, I started out just “fooling around” on documentaries. I thought I could handle it, keep it under control. When it came to seeing them in the theaters, it was by mistake or unintentionally, like the time I found myself watching The Thin Blue Line or Roger and Me. I enjoyed myself, but […]
Well, not quite, but close to my original dream. As I gave in a speech at DEFCON 9 a couple years back, it was my hope that eventually the collection of textfiles.com would become just another “ware”, a singular, tradeable “thing” that people could pass back and forth. By building it up into a multi-gigabyte […]
It’s natural to ask if I myself run some example of this very thing I collect so much information on. You’d be suspicious of a critic that doesn’t “like” movies or a music historian who never at least tried to pick up an instrument. When I was 12 and first getting into modems and collecting […]
One of the nice side-effects of an online life (and for some of us, childhood) is that almost all of the output of your efforts and experiences are digital, ready and waiting to be brought back in full binary clarity. With textfiles.com, this is especially the case, since people can go and find the exact […]
I’ve spent many nights answering e-mails to people who tell me about their memories with BBSes as they experienced them. In fact, it was the hundreds of responses that I originally got from posting the world’s largest BBS list that told me there were some serious holes in most computer history. Of course, the easiest […]