Jason Scott's Weblog
Hello, and, in some cases, welcome back. This is the official beginning of my own dedicated weblog, covering everything from essays I write about subjects I need to work out, to information about advances across my historical websites, to the occasional BBS Documentary gossip and discussion. While a number of locations have existed for this […]
Advances in technology, software or hardware or whatever, come from a lot of locations. More importantly, the version of the advance that becomes the most well known is both lauded as that person or group’s accomplishment, and criticized as a lightweight rehash of a previous technology that existed before it. This happens over and over; […]
It’s hard not to browse over the attendee list for Foo Camp and not feel sad that I couldn’t dip in and out of crowds of those folks. Some of them I heavily disagree with, some of them I worship from afar, but there’s no question that a goulash of them in a non-commercialized space […]
BoingBoing, as a print magazine, was a part of a universe of small-press publications, hatched in apartments and off-hours and tons of sneaking around being able to afford the next issue. There were lots of names for this sort of creation, but the closest is “the zine movement“, which essentially came into a golden period […]
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 […]