ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Documentary of an Addiction —

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 […]

Every BBS Textfile Ever —

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 […]

Does the BBS Guy Run a BBS? —

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 […]

The Race To Digitize Everything Ever —

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 […]

Through a Carrier, Darkly —

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 […]