1
The Other Half
On January 19th of this year, I set off to California to participate in a hastily-arranged appearance in a UCLA building to talk about saving climate data in the face of possible administrative swi…
Jason Scott (ASCII)
Jason Scott's Weblog
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Visit ascii.textfiles.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Jan 2009 – Aug 2024
History & Retro Computing 36Society, Policy & Culture 16Games & Graphics 9Web & Frontend 4Hardware & Electronics 4Life, Learning & Writing 2
2
Discord, or the Death of Lore
I chose the life, it didn’t choose me. I could have walked away from it a long time ago, and I’ve certainly shifted my focus over the years. But I still hold the heft and halter, the on…
3
Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami
There’s no way for me to know where your awareness starts with all this, so let’s just start at the beginning. Computer Shopper was a hell of a magazine. I wrote a whole essay about it,…
4
We are barely halfway done
I’m kind of broken. It has been a very productive day. I have been here since 8 in the morning. We have boxed over 400 boxes of material. There have been about a dozen and a half of volunteer…
5
The Emularity
Last week, on the heels of the DOS emulation announcement, one of the JSMESS developers, James Baicoianu, got Windows 3.11 running in a window with Javascript. That’s impressive enough on its…
6
It Is Done
When I can feel my face again, and after I finish cleaning up my untouched-for-a-week life up in New York, I will sit down and write a proper Post-mortem of everything, but here’s the high le…
7
Fuck the Cloud (2009)
This will be the last time I go along this area of discussion for a while because it’s just going to get very old very quickly. But I wanted, in one place, a quick manifesto/rant about this p…
8
Saving 25,000 Manuals
Earlier this year, a number of kind folks told me that an esteemed seller of manuals was going to be getting out of the business. I lamented but didn’t give it much thought. As the months wen…
9
Why the Apple II ProDOS 2.4 Release Is the OS News of the Year
In September of 2016, a talented programmer released his own cooked update to a major company’s legacy operating system, purely because it needed to be done. A raft of new features, wrap-in p…
10
The Geocities Torrent (~1TB of awesomeness)
Well, here we are on October 26th, 2010. Can it really be a year ago that Archive Team had dozens of people assaulting Yahoo’s servers desperately trying to save disappearing history? Well, l…
11
Screenshots Forever and Ever Until You Can’t Stand it
The Screen Shotgun, as mentioned before, is continuing its never-ending quest to play tens of thousands of games and programs, take screenshots, and upload them into the Internet Archive. Like any …
12
8-Bit Generation Documentary
UPDATE: Please read this later entry for update on this documentary. I’m putting this here to get some attention. There’s a documentary in production, or which was in prod…
13
Thousands of Hip Hop Mix Tapes, Why Not
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been uploading thousands of Hip-hop Mixtapes into the archive. The resulting collection still has a way to go before it’s everything I have acquired a…
14
A Simple Request: VLC.js
Almost five years ago to today, I made a simple proposal to the world: Port MAME/MESS to Javascript. That happened. I mean, it cost a dozen people hundreds of hours of their lives…. and there…
15
I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals
As should be expected, a number of individuals have come forward with responses to the initial blog post. While I do not expect everyone to take even a passing interest in the rabbit-hole of the si…
16
A Cabinet of Infocom Curiosities
This is big news, in the realm of game design studies. During the production of GET LAMP, I spent a lot of time digitizing or photographing all sorts of artifacts and documents related to Interacti…
17
Floppy Disks: It’s Too Late
Someone has to break it to you, and that person is me. It’s over. You waited too long. You procrastinated or made excuses or otherwise didn’t think about it or care. You didn’t do…
18
I Want Your AOL CDs
Yes, yes I do. As you might expect, someone who does a lot of something (collecting) like I do, in a pretty public fashion, tends to get some pretty shiny-polished chestnuts tossed over the fence. …
19
The Backing Up of the Internet Archive Continues
A little over a month ago, I cooked up a grandiose plan with the Archive Team to back up the Internet Archive, and discussed what that might entail and how one might approach it. How’s that t…
20
The Grind a Day: thousands of Apple II floppy disks archived
4am doesn’t suffer fools, or repetition. Or mysteries. Focused out of nowhere on tinkering with an Apple II a number of years back, they re-learned the whole of how the unique floppy disk sys…
21
MAME and the New Emulation Reality
I’m sorry all my weblog entries seem to be variations of emulation, Internet Archive, Archive Team and Vintage Computing, but that’s kind of all my life is right now anyway. (I’m …
22
Archiving in the time of streaming
Few things are harder to start than a narrative of the thing you “do” and what all the ramifications of it are. For people who don’t make it the center of their lives, your thing …
23
Prepping for the Transfer of 25,000 Manuals
A day after my previous post, and things have been happening. SHORT TERM: First, I asked for people to send money if they couldn’t help any other way, and people have. This took away any conc…
24
The Secret Feature of EM-DOSBOX on Internet Archive
There’s been a secret feature on the DOS-related emulated programs on the Internet Archive. It’s been there for over a half a year now. I’ll explain what it is and why I didn̵…
25
A Simple Explanation: VLC.js
The previous entry got the attention it needed, and the maintainers of the VLC project connected with both Emularity developers and Emscripten developers and the process has begun. The best example…
26
The Internet Arcade
When work began on JSMESS a couple years ago, I knew that it was probably somewhat easy to do all this conversion work for MAME (the arcade side) as it was for MESS (the computer and console side).…
27
The Dying Computer Museum
One can choose to focus on the car crash, or the lessons learned from the car crash. Let’s do a little of both. The proposition of the Living Computer Museum was initially simple, and rather …
28
I am no longer attending vintage computer festivals
I spent some time trying to figure out when to make this announcement in a way that didn’t seem like direct sabotage; the day before the VCF East event seems about right. Years ago, clearing …
29
The Quiet Wikideath of BBS History
Folks, I’ve said I’m not a fan of Wikipedia for nearly ten years now. I used to mention it in presentations until I found that eighteen-year-olds would confront me at the end, like I sp…
30
A Piece of Apple II History Cracks Open
The world of Apple II “cracking” has always held an interesting fascination for me – the thinking involved, the magic of tracing programs, and of course the “crack screens&#…