Top all-time · #15922
Jason Scott
Personal blog · textfiles.libsyn.comhistorysystems
Jason Scott's personal blog at textfiles.libsyn.com covers history and systems. Since 2019, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 5 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-19, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Jason Scott's podcast episodes on computing history, BBS culture, the nostalgic internet and tech ephemera. Commenters point to specific episodes and to his documentaries.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Historian and loudmouth Jason Scott shares stories of technology, retrocomputing, documentary filmmaking, and general schennanigans from his decades of travels and research. From experiences on the road while shooting documentaries to often-obscure points of order, Jason keeps a fast-moving pace and
Most-linked posts?
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-04-27
What Hacker News says?
He also gave us the brilliant BBS: The Documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dddbe9OuJLU GET LAMP: The Text Adventure Documentary (shot in 1080p) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhbcDzbGSU and (apart from his many talks) his podcast "Jason Scott talks his way out of it" which is just gem after gem of documented tech ephemera. https://textfiles.libsyn.com/ It's baffingly hard to quantify how many people he (an…
Comment linking /
on “textfiles.com”I like Jason Scott's take on the nostalgic internet: it was a cosy place for people "in the know" and we miss being in a special club. https://textfiles.libsyn.com/the-nostalgic-web-episode The post's author also talks about how social media is different from the web of the past. This is a good time to point out the difference between operating on the Web and operating on the Internet. The Internet is just a client-…
Comment linking /the-nostalgic-web-episode
on “I wish I didn't miss the '90s-00s internet”I never knew him, but Jason Scott did what seemed like a nice job of memorializing him after his recent death: https://textfiles.libsyn.com/the-cheshire-catalyst-episode
Comment linking /the-cheshire-catalyst-episode
on “Construction of the AT&T Long Lines "Cheshire" underground site”jason scott was recently talking in his podcast about this sort of thing: https://textfiles.libsyn.com/the-podcasting-episode To be honest, as someone who listens to podcasts for 14+ years now, I always found it completely hilarious when the dead tree media talks about podcasts.
Comment linking /the-podcasting-episode
on “I'm Against Podcasts”https://textfiles.libsyn.com/
Comment linking /
on “ASCII by Jason Scott”