Jason Scott's Weblog
Simon of Legaltorrents (and a bunch of other cool stuff) asked me if it was OK to put an episode of the BBS Documentary up on his website of cool crap to download. How could I say no, both by license and wish? The thing is licensed so that he could put it up without […]
I got a mail just this week: “So, I have a collection of a few hundred megs of MP3s of voice mailboxes run by hackers in 1990. Do you have any suggestions on who I should give them to or what to do with them?” Why yes, I said. yes I do. Only one or […]
As someone who is bathed in Bulletin Board System (BBS) history nearly every waking hour, I can sometimes feel like I’m the only one going completely out of his way to find narratives. It’s easy enough to copy together a bunch of floppy disks or scan a bunch of printouts but that’s not really the […]
I loved the little theatre. I don’t quite know when I first heard about it, but likely the name rattled around in my reading the free newspapers while I was in college. That’s how it often works: you see something playing there in an article next to the stuff about politics and bands, and then […]
Seems I can’t go too long before adding ANOTHER sub-site to textfiles.com. But this was was a logical conclusion and has been on the back-burner for about 5 years (according to the file modification dates I have around). http://artifacts.textfiles.com ARTIFACTS covers a problem I’ve had for years and years. People send me collections of files […]
Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 13:16:29 -0400 From: “Giesen, Brian” Reply-To: “Bell, John” To: ascii@textfiles.com Subject: Cocktails, Conversation & the Future of Blogging – RSVP Today! Jason, I was reading your blog and thought you might be interested in attending a free event in Boston we are co-hosting with Six Apart next week. The event […]
Yes, it’s time once again for “So what file from the textfiles.com collection of sites is getting downloaded the most?” And apparently, the winner is this little charmer: He’s extremely popular among the Myspace crowd, and if you think I’m going to link to Myspace, I’d rather eat a jar of thumbtacks. I consider all […]
One of my friends, knowing how much I’ve grown to dig the video weblogger Ze Frank and his show, sent me a link (which is now getting quite popular) of an absolutely spectacular presentation he gave at an ideas conference called TED a little ways back, before he started doing an every-weekday weblog. And I […]
I’m bothered by the battle over the word “Hacker”. I’m most bothered by it because I consider the battle over. While I don’t mind the energy poured into it, since it generates content and I like content, I do mind the characterization that it’s a relatively new battle, one that is just on a sort […]
I have a Google alert set up to tell me when media discusses Bulletin Board Systems. What can I say, I like to be on the cutting edge. People often cite BBSes in two main areas: discussing China, and as a reference of how we don’t do things that way anymore. One of the articles […]