Top all-time · #310
Jason Scott
Personal blog · ascii.textfiles.comhistoryculture
Jason Scott's personal blog at ascii.textfiles.com covers history and culture. Since 2008, 167 different Hacker News readers have linked it 307 times, most often “Floppy Disks: It’s Too Late”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-21, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 3 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Jason Scott's ASCII textfiles site for his writing on digital archiving, the fragility of old floppy disks, and BBS and computer history. Commenters also cite it on Wikipedia deletion and CRT display emulation.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Jason Scott's Weblog
Most-linked posts?
- Floppy Disks: It’s Too Late13 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2011-07-12
- Fuck the Cloud (2009)10 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2009-01-20
- Saving 25,000 Manuals7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2015-08-15
- /archives/10116 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2013-05-28
- Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-06-06
- /4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2011-05-10
- Facebook is a living computer nightmare4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2011-05-27
- Yahoolocaust3 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2010-12-24
- I Want Your AOL CDs3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-05-19
- Datapocalypso (RE: Eviction, or the Coming Datapocalypse)3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2009-01-06
What Hacker News says?
You might enjoy this : https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5509 .
Comment linking /archives/5509
on “Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year”Submitted The Other Half as a story · 805 points
HN discussionLike so? http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1011
Comment linking /archives/1011
on “20% of requests for Wikimedia Commons are for one image of a flower”Submitted We are barely halfway done as a story · 487 points
HN discussionEnjoy your cloud service. "FUCK THE CLOUD" by Jason Scott: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1717 Proud user of Linux and SELinux (mandatory access control system, which protects your data from your apps).
Comment linking /archives/1717
on “Apple Stole My Music”Submitted The Emularity as a story · 332 points
HN discussion>At times, it's incredibly depressing to me this is the case. How will people know about the human race if our entire culture is wrapped up in bits and bytes and discarded without a thought to their permanence? It will as though we never existed. You may want to talk to Jason Scott or other Internet Archivers. (He mostly goes from physical to digital, but I'm sure this subject would interest him.) In the meantime ha…
Comment linking /archives/3613
on “I Am An Object Of Internet Ridicule, Ask Me Anything”Submitted It Is Done as a story · 329 points
HN discussionThe next step is emulating a CRT monitor to get the fundamentally analog nature of the display right: Even if the computer thinks in pixels, it was still ultimately controlling a complex analog waveform being sent to some number of electron guns steered by magnets. Higher-resolution later computer monitors came closer to imitating pixels, but analog TV didn't try; it just had lines and interlaced fields. Old games t…
Comment linking /archives/3786
on “Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers”Submitted Fuck the Cloud (2009) as a story · 325 points
HN discussionHe's also the guy who goatse'd MySpace: Initial post: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/989 Post about goatse: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1011 More: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1012 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1127 Moral: HOTLINKING BAD
Comment linking /archives/1127
on “textfiles.com”Submitted Saving 25,000 Manuals as a story · 314 points
HN discussionI always loved this story of his: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1127 For some reason, the original is gone. That's his sequel.
Comment linking /archives/1127
on “textfiles.com”Submitted Why the Apple II ProDOS 2.4 Release Is the OS News of the Year as a story · 298 points
HN discussion> I don’t understand what Yahoo is supposed to be. The corporate equivalent of a terminal cancer patient. What it was, is aptly described here: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2848
Comment linking /archives/2848
on “Yahoo Answers to shut down May 4, 2021”Submitted Screenshots Forever and Ever Until You Can’t Stand it as a story · 238 points
HN discussionThe point is historical preservation: Putting ancient games and systems on the Web as a way to enable people to experience them, as part of digital museums, online academic papers, and such, to provide some (imperfect) context for what would otherwise be dry technical history. It's in JS because it's the only language that doesn't require plugins, and so has a better-than-average chance of running on a variety of di…
Comment linking /archives/3745
on “Statically Recompiling NES Games into Native Executables with LLVM and Go”Submitted The Geocities Torrent (~1TB of awesomeness) as a story · 238 points
HN discussionFrom a previous post: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4695 > Hey, go ask Google. I think people don’t understand what Google is and how much it particularly cares about doing “The Right Thing” (not much), and the next person to mention the Linear Book Scanner (a prototype that destroys books), well, they’re going to get a hug and my distracting words of love.
Comment linking /archives/4695
on “We are barely halfway done”Submitted 8-Bit Generation Documentary as a story · 237 points
HN discussionWhat an amazing effort. In case someone local wants to join in: The warehouse is located in Finksburg, MD, about 30 miles northwest of Baltimore. [taken from the original post of the issue: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4683 ]
Comment linking /archives/4683
on “We are barely halfway done”Submitted Thousands of Hip Hop Mix Tapes, Why Not as a story · 218 points
HN discussionWe stock over 400,000 manuals The original estimate[1] was only(!) 25k, so that explains the need to order more boxes. [1] http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4683
Comment linking /archives/4683
on “We are barely halfway done”Submitted A Simple Request: VLC.js as a story · 214 points
HN discussionFor context: This is the third post in a series. The author (Jason Scott) is trying to save ~25,000 manuals, instruction booklets, and engineering notes (largely electronics related, created over the last 80 years). This is a large project, the company which owns the manuals currently is going out of business, and all the manuals will be thrown away very soon (re: tomorrow). First post: http://ascii.textfiles.com/ar…
Comment linking /archives/4683
on “We are barely halfway done”Submitted I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals as a story · 195 points
HN discussionSome context: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4683
Comment linking /archives/4683
on “We are barely halfway done”Submitted A Cabinet of Infocom Curiosities as a story · 194 points
HN discussionI'll do my duty and provide some links as a fellow spelunker (apologies if you've already seen some of these): http://textfiles.com/directory.html ( https://archive.org/details/textfiles-dot-com-2011 or use rsync for a local copy), plus he made https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBS:_The_Documentary with the full interviews available ( https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5289 ) https://breakintochat.com/collections/mess…
Comment linking /archives/5289
on “Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat”Submitted Floppy Disks: It’s Too Late as a story · 181 points
HN discussion
