ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Javascript Hero: Change Computer History Forever —

Besides adding thousands of items to archive.org and uploading terabytes of data (I’m at 28 terabytes of data uploaded since May of this year), I’ve also been working among a bunch of fronts to bring a whole raft of knowledge and history into the browseable, usable world. Trust me, a lot is getting in there.  Allow me to both reveal the next step in this grand arch plan, and put a call out for people to help.

To review, the Grand Arch Plan that has been going on for 30 years.

Step One: Begin collecting computer history. I started this step when I was 9, pulling together printouts, cassettes, later floppy disks, and hardware.

Step Two: Put it all up on the Web. I started this step when I was 28, creating textfiles.com and consistently adding to both that collection and related collections.

Step Three: Absorb the human stories. This is what BBS Documentary, GET LAMP and the next three documentaries are for. This has resulted in hundreds of hours of footage of people talking about computer history, almost all of which I am putting online into the collections begun in step two.

And now the next step:

Step Four: Ubiquity. Make it possible to get to all of computer history from everywhere, as wherever feasible. Do what it takes to make it feasible.

I’m well into this step, having affiliated myself with one of the largest public data collections in the world and giving them massive piles of materials from the first three steps. Everything is open, everything is on fast pipes, everything is easy to pull down and do what you want with it. It’s going very, very well.

But on the whole I am primarily dealing with artifacts and not experience.  A number of people have done some good work to bring in experience of computer history, most notably the Emulator People. In fact, if you don’t go too crazy on the rococo specifics of the accuracy of emulators, they do really really well to take you from “I wonder what it was like to play Choplifter” to “Wow, I am playing Choplifter“. And as someone sitting in the channels of several emulation projects, I will tell you they are all getting better, every single day – improvements in speed, accuracy, flexibility and expandability.

So here is what I’d like to do.

I want to help port the MESS and MAME emulators to Javascript.

Without sounding too superlative, I think this will change computer history forever. The ability to bring software up and running into any browser window will enable instant, clear recall and reference of the computing experience to millions. Setting up images that provide walkthroughs of specific computer history/reference, that will allow playing and and recall of all manner of things online for the last 50 years (the MESS emulator has support for the 1960 PDP-1). I am more than willing to engage in debate over this – but my hope is that you’re past this and going “but how is that even possible?”

It’s possible. Javascript has become unbelievably powerful. Here’s some stuff you may not know Javascript has been able to do so far:

  • Linux. Specifically, a javascript emulation of PC hardware, with an entire Linux OS running on top of it.
  • H.264 – They’ve now implemented a H.264 codec in Javascript.
  • PDF Reading. The pdf.js reader will allow you to read PDFs in anything with Javascript support.
  • Apple II – Gil Megidish has implemented an Apple II emulator in Javascript, which you can play games in.

My strong belief is the emulator people should focus on emulation, and the javascript people on javascript – that javascript should just be one of the ports of MESS and MAME to accompany all the other ports. I feel like there are emulation people who are really focused on the proper accuracy and reliability issues, and Javascript people who are really good at taking accurate, reliable code and making it work in Javascript. In fact, I suspect it’s very easy – we just need someone focused on it.

I’m focused on it. It’s what I do. It’s what I’ve been doing for 30 years.

I am right here. I can be reached at jscott@archive.org or jason@textfiles.com and we can get started making an ad-hoc group to work on it. I can answer questions and talk to anyone. This is priority one for me.

Hope to hear from you.

23 Comments

Joe’s Offer —

The last two times I saw Joe were not the best: once at my Uncle Danny’s funeral, and then on the hospital bed that would be his last. Not really able to speak, my last visit with him was with my father and his son, who shouted questions checking on Joe and Joe doing his best to respond, usually with a halting thumbs-up. He was surrounded by people who made their love for him plain and constant, which in general is not a bad way to go.

I probably saw Joe a half-dozen times in my life, many of them too young to remember at all.  And perhaps I should hasten to talk about the inherent blessing in the fact that it was many years before it was really explained to me how many relatives in Joe’s generation were murdered in faraway lands, making him rarer than I would have understood. So Joe was simply Joe, one of a number of family through various convoluted connections that I’d be introduced and re-introduced to over time.

At one point in the early 1980s, when I was just barely in my teens (and likely not even there yet), there was a situation where Joe and his wife Sylvia lived just a couple of exits down from where I lived, although the natural difference in our lives meant we didn’t really hang out. To add to this theme of forgotten details and hazy aspects, I have entirely misplaced what put me at their place one day, although it probably had to do with some finagling of scheduled events and responsibilities amongst my parents, or maybe an effort to have me connect with one of the previous generations. But there I was in one of those condos that older people keep, full of items with stories I don’t necessarily want to hear and an utter lack of entertainment by the standards of someone used to his Atari 2600 and no-profanity-barred cable television.

As I just hinted, my parents were divorced and had been for multiple years, with my mother and my siblings living in a condo this side of crowded and my father living in a house that he’d built for a family now gone, leaving it with the feeling of a forgotten cabin.  Anybody who tells you that divorce is anything but a direct shotgun to the face for the kids is lying to you or just doesn’t want to deal with that fact; it has a whole range of effects but a child who watches his house burn down can hug his parents to deal with it – a child whose parents split up can do no such thing. So, let’s assume that somewhere in my countenance or self-regard was an obvious-to-anyone-looking sense of wreckage.

So, Joe looked, even back in 1981-1982 days, like an older guy, the kind who might be sitting on the chairs at the barber shop or on one end of the bar, laughing and slapping a lot of backs and generally being one of the gang; a real down to earth guy. My father at some point mentioned to me that Joe was an olympic-level partier, which I assume means he was a close-it-down dude, in his younger years. I detected awe on the part of my dad. Joe also was wearing a very loud shirt the day I was visiting, and I am sure this had an effect on me in terms of what shirt I could be wearing wherever I wanted to.

So, it was a pretty a-ok day, with some conversation and me hanging out, and at some point it was time for me to leave, for whichever parent it was to pick me up.

And as I was getting ready to go, Joe got very serious for a moment.

And realize that Joe did not have one of those faces that was built to go serious. It did not look like a face that needed things to be serious, especially these days. And he put his hand on my shoulder, a huge hand, all things considered. It’s nearly 30 years later. I still remember the face. I still remember the hand.

And he said Jason, I know things can get rough, and if you ever, ever feel you need to get away, you come here. No questions asked. You always got a place here.

I probably nodded and maybe thanked him, as any gift you didn’t know you were getting 10 milliseconds before gets thanks.

When parents get divorced, besides the stupid infighting that often happens and the arguments over nothing and the haggling and the idiot phone calls, there’s this gap of responsibility that happens. The kids know this and spot it a mile away. There’s just no way to coordinate oversight. It’s there, and you generally have awareness, but there’s so many ways for a kid to get lost in the shuffle and get away with anything they want, for some period of time. Combine that with a resentment for the shotgun in the face, the disconnection of what family is, and you’ve got all the ingredients for something truly awful.

Maybe drugs, smoking, drinking, where you can express yourself as doing something nobody approves of, feel like a hero and rebel, and have this piece of things be yours. Until they own you, of course, but before then, there’s a lot of you and little of them. Or it might be a propensity to be creative, to act out, to get involved in something that takes you away. Or it’s a withdrawal, a collapsing. Something happens. It rarely doesn’t. Not really.

And in that gap, you can make some incredibly stupid choices, especially if you’re old enough to be ambulatory and prone to rage or panic and a whole other spectrum of feelings. Incredibly stupid choices. And I made a bunch, to be sure, but one thing that never happened was me loading myself into some conveyance and disappearing.

I didn’t need to, you see. I had Joe’s Offer. At any time, during those years, I could have walked down the highway or along one of the side roads to his Condo and taken a time-out and gotten myself together. I knew this. I knew it inherently, like someone jumping from high point to high point knows that in the darkness somewhere, there’s that safety net.

And I made it through – by the time I was 15, I was living in a much better place with a social network of friends who were really smart and engaging and I was involved in a bunch of projects that got better and better. I didn’t need the safety net anymore – I was completely out of the woods.

So, somewhere in my 20s, when I was actually making fat sacks of mad cash in administrating boxes and had an awesome house I was renting and generally being one with the world, I reached out to two fellows, both brothers of ex-girlfriends, who seemed to be going through things – nothing rough like I probably was, but just feeling a little out of sorts. Same deal: I know things can get rough, and if you ever, ever feel you need to get away, you come here. No questions asked. You always got a place here.

Both gave thanks, both never took me up on it, both probably forgot about it at some point. But maybe it was always there for a while, that knowledge, that little piece saying there was a third option instead of one or two rotten ones. The safety net is not there to feel smug or be part of the show – the safety net is there to provide safety.

Joe, likely, forgot about his offer at some point in the decades since. He’s been gone a year now, and while he probably never really knew the effect his simple offer had, I’m telling you now.

You know exactly who I’m talking about. It’s not your business. Either parent would scream at you for meddling. The kid seems mostly fine. But not completely.

Make Joe’s Offer to them.

If you’re lucky, they’ll never thank you.

10 Comments

I Can Convert Your Betacam SP Tapes —

As part of my work for the Game Developers Conference as historian and archivist, I have been given their entire backlog of recorded conference tapes. Many of them have not seen the light of day since they were recorded – others were converted to RealMedia format, and then guess what happened next. We’ve been holding off on me doing more weblog entries while I slam through the backlog and they switch hosting servers, but I’ve been busy in the meantime. Here’s the tapes I’ve completed in the last month:

There’s lots of great material in there – presentations, panels, contests, performances – and they’ll all hit the light of day. I promise. But as I go through the next phase of tapes, the remainder of the piles, it occurred to me there would be great advantage to offering to the world a chance to convert some BetacamSP tapes, if you have them.

If you’re not sure what those look like, here’s the two form factors of BetacamSP that fit in this machine:

Just to complete the show and tell, the BetacamSP machine, the Sony UVW-1800, and the whole setup looks like this:

So, what exactly am I offering here?

Well, my theory is that there are a lot of folks out there with a few of these tapes – either a one-off handed to them from someone dumping materials, or which a company or companies paid a creator to make a bunch of years ago. You don’t want to go through all this effort to get this setup together just to do a few tapes – well, here I am. I want to see history saved, and these tapes are not getting younger. Most of the GDC tapes I have, in fact the straight majority, are 100% fine, but a few aren’t as hot as they could be. I want to make sure other folks don’t have one-off tapes that they can’t get to.

Digitizing the way I do produces a .ts file, which almost everything can deal with – it’s basically MPEG-2 format. I’m finding files between 1-4 gigabytes, very manageable, and from which all sorts of other formats can be derived.

Additionally, I can see about having your .ts file go right to archive.org, where you can point everyone to it, upload a copy to Youtube, describe what it is, the whole deal.

So, if you are finding this via a web search or another method, hi. Contact me at betatapes@textfiles.com and we’ll see about saving your magnetic memories.

1 Comment

Jason Scott: Shareware Calvacade —

There’s fast, there’s ultra-fast, and then there’s the speed at which Adrian “IronGeek” Crenshaw has rendered out and uploaded the full talks from his first annual Derbycon hacker and security conference. As it was, and due to an extremely silly scheduling conflict, I could only attend the first day of the conference, and because of a series of late flights and missed connections, I got in so late on Thursday that during Friday I had to take a 2 hour nap just to be functioning for my 7pm talk.

But regardless, I got my chance to present a new speech, Jason Scott’s Shareware Calvacade, and he has it up on youtube.  Here you go:

Here’s a direct link.

This really is just a fun little speech, mostly providing an overview of the history of Shareware, some wild tangents, and some weird images of the computing past. It’s not infused with the weight of responsibility or an overarching theme – it was meant to be a pleasant post-dinner (or pre-dinner) collection of Neat Crap, meant to inspire people to my big works coming down the pike from my Internet Archive work. I hope it does that, as well as allow me to scream at an Acer Laptop and tell the Worst X-Box Live Joke Ever.

One thing I do want everyone to bring out of it is how I’m looking for more material for CD-ROMs and software in general! Don’t hesitate to contact me if you think you have some lying around and want it to live again as an exhibit or archive.

I’d like to thank the Derbycon folks for an amazing time, even if I truncated it, and to congratulate them on their wild success (the convention was sold out, and filled to the brim with awesome folks).  Next year, I’m there the whole way through!

 

 

4 Comments

A Cloud of Opinion —

As is often the case with Reddit, some random user randomly linked to one of my weblog entries. In this case, the Fuck the Cloud entry. And as is often the case with Reddit these days, it smeared any previous record of hits I ever got on the weblog, ever, since I started doing this, and I had my top reading day ever: 41,000 users in a 24 hour period (and another 6,000 the next day).

And as is typical, people found ways to discuss every possible interpretation of the entry and every possible interpretation of everything not the story: the color scheme, my sex life, my age, my resume, my own use of “cloud-like” services, you name it. Opinion Spectrum Collapse Disorder – I coined it!

Much more interesting was a little rumble of second-wave folks finding me and addressing me, ones who missed the whole thing the first time and maybe missed me all this time, and who came to me for more. And of that, there was WebProNews.

WebProNews would not normally be the type of entity I would either browse, or even think about – caked with ads, resembling a horse-racing call-sheet more than a website, this place creates tons of news stories with a perky host, and posts almost every day, giving you ads and sponsor links galore while providing content.  But for some reason, when they asked about talking Cloud with me, I said yes.

I did it over Skype, which was damned convenient, although maybe with my hair such a mess I should have worn a hat.  On the other end was a lady with a notepad and a green screen, whose name was Abby Johnson (No, not that Abby Johnson), and damn if she wasn’t one of the best interviewers I’ve ever had, save for Kevin Poulsen.  She asked all sorts of good questions, gave good followup responses, and took the conversation all over the place.

So here, in a rare show, I link you to two versions of the same video on WebProNews:

Instead of Ranty-Go-Bragh Jason which is what we usually get related to the Cloud, this is thoughtful, measured Jason, a rare sight indeed, like two unicorns chained together with goblin gold. I figure faithful readers deserve to see it. If you just want the video, you can click on the little chain at the bottom of the video window and grab the whole thing, like I did.

Great job, Abby. It’s rare indeed I link to such a site like that, but such respect deserves my respect.

P.S. Fuck the Cloud.

1 Comment

Trailer for the Two Hands Project Documentary —

In two entries (one and two),  I mentioned I was editing the Two Hands Project, which is a documentary on hackerspaces.  I also, I hoped, made it clear that there’s a ton of priorities before it, including finishing editing work on the Going Cardboard documentary, and, you know, all this stuff with terabytes of data going up on archive.org.

I was asked a while ago to give a presentation/talk at the CT Hackerspace in Watertown, CT.  Somewhere in there, it morphed into “Jason will talk about the two hands project documentary and show some work”, and I thought, you know, I really should at least cut together a trailer for the thing, since I have all the footage right there. So, two hours later, I did it, and showed it at the CT Hackerspace. And now you can see it too:

It was just a couple hours work, so no big deal, but it probably does a good job of showing just how much variation and footage that gang of guys shot in those 30 days.

Enjoy!

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GET FAILURE —

A new review of GET LAMP has been posted, and it is not positive.  (Here’s a WebCitation link).

I won’t even pretend to claim much knowledge of Auntie Pixelante, because I don’t really have much beyond having followed the weblog for the site for about a year, and keeping track of a lot of the tools and assisting programs that are cited there, stuff that gets you out and running if you have some ideas for a game.  Lots and lots of embryonic game ideas come out of that place, so it’s pretty easy to just sit back and enjoy the feed. I didn’t notice the review until my RSS scanner that looks for mentions of the movie kicked it up, but then I saw it in my regular newsreader, so destiny was at hand.

I also won’t pretend to definitively summarize the review in a way that you shouldn’t read it completely; but I’ll take a shot at saying the review is primarily one of disappointment at my focus on Infocom, lack of coverage of the more experimental aspects of interactive fiction, and a monolithic point of view with Infocom constituting the majority of discussion or subject matter in the movie.

Why am I linking to/bringing attention to a negative review? Because the fact is, it’s a review. More than that, it’s a specific call-out to a perspective on the film, and yes, ultimately disappointment that that perspective feels unfulfilled, and there’s just not been that many for GET LAMP, even as we pass a year of release. I know tens of thousands of people have seen the work, and I have seen people write about text adventures and mention they saw GET LAMP, but there’s only a tiny handful of actual film criticism aimed at the work, and that’s always made me a bit sad.

I did go to film school, after all, and part what got drummed into me was the idea that film criticism is part of the process of a film – after it’s finished, after the ballyhoo and the screenings and the promotion would come informed, thoughtful essays as to what the whole thing meant or what meanings and ideas could be teased from the work that the creators either intended or unconsciously added along the way. To that end, I’ve just had very little in that direction. The BBS documentary got some, but even then, nothing even approaching the gold standard of film criticism, which is this article.

And so for me the whole thing is incomplete until it gets reviews, essays and thoughts, good and bad, and any move in that direction pleases me, so thanks to Auntie Pixelante for this review.

And as for the review?

Well, on the charge of “seems way focused on Infocom”, totally guilty as charged. Infocom is so important to the story of interactive fiction that besides a healthy mention in the middle of the main GET LAMP movie, there’s a whole other 40 minute movie called EXAMINE INFOCOM on the disc that covers Infocom and Infocom, Infocom, Infocom. On the second disc, I have extended bonus features discussing nothing but Infocom’s Z-Machine, the unique aspects of Planetfall and a whole other host of Infocom-ish subjects. That’s a fact. Book me.

I’ll take issue with the portrayal of the film as monolithic in opinion – as mentioned Chris Crawford gets a few shots in, but even across other people like inky, Adam Thornton, Andrew Plotkin and Ron Martinez, the entire medium and its failings come in for some shots, and the question of “what’s next” comes up. But, and this is the important aspect that I think is missed, this documentary bootstraps you from nothing about text adventures to going into incredibly detailed discussions of the nature of puzzles and the issues of overflowing object tables with irrelevant descriptions in the name of “realism”, as well as a host of other ethereal subjects that come down to unique problems of the collision of writing with this whole game/experience thing. The movie, that is, is not for people long off the beaten path of game design seeking ever more whacky and up-ending paradigms in the demolishing of current expectations of the very nature of interactive writing – this movie is meant to be a ground-up bringing in of the idea of text adventures and what it all might have meant, from both the idea of an industry and what would draw people to the present day to keep creating in it long after the commercial interest has receded back into the ocean.

There’s a point of view that has occasionally come in, which I call the Mass Effect group, although it’s not directly tied to that specific game, but along the lines of “Why didn’t GET LAMP cover Mass Effect/Bioshock/Cryptozookeeper”. It’s considered a missed opportunity that I didn’t draw a direct, bold line from the text adventure medium into these modern works, but I didn’t think that was the job of this film. It wasn’t even the job of the film to cover point and click games like King’s Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, or The Last Express. I thought that there was no video documentary covering text adventures, and I do believe I was right. In terms of the “coverage” the review mentions, that’s all generally written interviews (and usually just of Steve Meretzky), or essays and recounting of artifacts. If there is another film, television production or even audio production with Amy Briggs, Stu Galley and Marc Blank all discussing their work and the general aspects of the text adventure medium, I’ll be down at Cafe du Chapeau chowing down.

What I was worried about was that all these great folks would pass on without portraying the emotion of the work they were doing, and that this community of text adventure writers, which in some ways is always on edge to tearing itself apart, would fade into self-containment without their work reaching a wider audience. For that, I say mission accomplished. Expecting it to then go on past an hour and a half into realms still experimental, or even attempt to bring in the full parallel line of related game approaches, was just not in the cards, and I hope the next text adventure documentary someone makes covers that.

Thanks for the review!

5 Comments

FaceLift (A Single Image) —

I don’t normally post “up to the minute” entries, but what the heck. Today, Facebook announced it was changing up, completely, how you interact with Facebook, including a whole range of profile adjustments, retrieval of random items from the past, and a whole new range of “partners” who will be shoving items into Facebook (and, ostensibly, taking a lot more customer data out).  One such partner is the social media weblog Mashable, which wrote a jaw-to-floor lauding of the new Facebook  as changing the face of social media. It’s something when such craven, transparent logrolling is considered standard operating procedure.

I have no interest in writing more than I did in FaceFacts, except that I was browsing the Facebook weblog and saw this single, enlightening snapshot of conversation below it:

Kaitlin works the registers at a Legoland. Jonathan is director of business development at a spanish-language “hot deals” site that has an application on Facebook that gives you the latest bargains and fills your timeline with offers throughout the day.

Kaitlin is unhappy. Jonathan is delighted. Kaitlin feels unease and discontent at what is happening. Jonathan tells her to change or die.

I suppose I could go on, but it would be redundant.

Enjoy your future.

9 Comments

The Next Documentary —

The Next Documentary is actually three documentaries, and one of those documentaries is six documentaries.

Now, you would think with my job at the Internet Archive and all my other projects and endeavors, I wouldn’t be into making another documentary. You especially would not expect me to be making three at the same time. Well, here we are, with me opening a Kickstarter campaign asking for pledges towards the budget of this triple threat project. So let me explain out a few things on that Kickstarter page – or you can just click on the widget above and watch my pitch film, which might rank as one of the stranger ones in Kickstarter’s scant history.

Over the next few weeks I am guaranteed to write more about these subjects, these projects and related aspects of mounting these productions. But for now, I’ll just leave this link here and ask you to check it out. Thanks.

3 Comments

The Sound of Pirate Radio —


Part of my work with the Internet Archive is writing weblog entries about parts of the whole crazy collections they have to expand knowledge of the mission out to greater realms of folks. I considered writing one on this exhibit/collection but decided it was just a little too far this side of weird, so it won’t go on the official Internet Archive weblog, even though it really should.

Since the 1990s, a fellow named Sealord has been recording pirate radio broadcasts coming across shortwave bands. Without authorization, license, or any sort of oversight, all manner of folks have been broadcasting illegal but probably not overly immoral shows out into the air. This collection, which is over 11 gigabytes and counting, has hours and hours of radio broadcasts, crackling with the sound of distant voices shouting over static and electromagnetic corruption. With names like XYZ Digital Pirate, Wolverine Radio, Whispery ID, Thinking Man Radio, The Voice of the Last DJ…. you’re talking some strange and mysterious personalities out there. (I learned that this beautiful, terrifying thing has been lurking on Internet Archive’s servers from Corqspy.)

Clicking on them is, of course, a total crapshoot, just like if you’d dialed into these places from your rig. And there’s just so much of it, I have no idea what you’ll find buried in there. But what a miracle it is that someone would take the time to record them, record when they got the shows, and then we’d have something like the Internet Archive to allow people to browse this stuff far beyond its ethereal nature and point in time!

Check it out.

6 Comments