Archivist and historian of technology, performer, internet personality
Jason Scott Sadofsky (born September 13, 1970) is an American archivist, historian of technology, filmmaker, performer, and actor. Scott has been known by the online pseudonyms Sketch, SketchCow, Sketch The Cow, The Slipped Disk,[1] and textfiles. He has been called "the figurehead of the digital archiving world".[2]
Jason Scott Sadofsky[6] graduated from Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, New York, and served on the staff of the school newspaper under the title "Humor Staff". While in high school he produced the humor magazine Esnesnon ("nonsense" backwards).[7] He later graduated from Emerson College in 1992 with a film degree.[8] While at Emerson, he worked for the school humor magazine, school newspaper, WERS 88.9 FM radio, and served as art director on several dramatic plays.[citation needed]
In 1990, Scott co-created TinyTIM, a popular MUSH that he ran for ten years.[10] In 1995, Jason joined the video game company Psygnosis as a technical support worker, before being hired by a video game startup, Focus Studios, as an art director. After Focus Studios' closure, Jason moved into UNIX administration,[11] where he remained until 2009.
He has been a speaker at DEF CON, an annual hacker conference, the first time at the 7th conference in 1999, and has spoken there almost every year since then. Scott also spoke at PhreakNIC 6 and 9, Rubi Cons 4 and 5, the 5th H.O.P.E. conference in 2004, Notacons 1, 2 (as a backup), 3 and 4, Toorcon 7, and beta premiered his documentary at the 7th annual Vintage Computer Festival. Most of his talks focus on the capturing of digital history or consist of narratives of stories relevant to his experiences online.[12]
In 2006, Scott announced that he was starting a documentary on video arcades, titled ARCADE.[13] Although he did not complete the project, all of the footage he shot for ARCADE has been made available on the Internet Archive.[14][15]
In 2007, he co-founded Blockparty, a North American demoparty.[16] For their inaugural year, they paired up with Notacon which takes place annually in Cleveland, Ohio. This collaborative effort allowed the fledgling party to utilize the existing support structure of an established conference.
In October 2009, he started raising funds for a year-long sabbatical from his job as a computer systems administrator, to pursue technology history and archival projects full-time. By November 2009, he had reached his funding goals, with the support of over 300 patrons.[23]
Sockington was a domestic cat who lived in Waltham, Massachusetts. He gained large-scale fame via the social networking site Twitter. Scott regularly posted from Sockington's Twitter account from late 2007.[33]As of January 2018[update], Sockington's account has over 1.4million followers, many of which are pet accounts themselves.[33][34] Sockington died on July 18, 2022.[35]
ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters. The term is also loosely used to refer to text-based visual art in general. ASCII art can be created with any text editor, and is often used with free-form languages. Most examples of ASCII art require a fixed-width font such as Courier for presentation.
A bulletin board system (BBS), also called a computer bulletin board service (CBBS), is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user performs functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging messages with other users through public message boards and sometimes via direct chatting. In the early 1980s, message networks such as FidoNet were developed to provide services such as NetMail, which is similar to internet-based email.
The computer art scene, or simply artscene, is the community interested and active in the creation of computer-based artwork.
GeoCities, later Yahoo! GeoCities, was a web hosting service that allowed users to create and publish websites for free and to browse user-created websites by their theme or interest, active from 1994 to 2009. GeoCities was started in November 1994 by David Bohnett and John Rezner, and was named Beverly Hills Internet briefly before being renamed GeoCities. On January 28, 1999, it was acquired by Yahoo!, at which time it was reportedly the third-most visited website on the World Wide Web.
ACiD Productions (ACiD) is a digital art group. Founded in 1990, the group originally specialized in ANSI artwork for bulletin board systems (BBS). More recently, they have extended their reach into other graphical media and computer software development. During the BBS-era, their biggest competitor was iCE Advertisements.
Christian Wirth, better known by the pseudonym RaD Man, is an American computer artist and historian. He works in the field of ANSI art, a method of creating art using a limited set of text characters and color escape codes based loosely on the relevant ANSI standard.
ANSI art is a computer art form that was widely used at one time on bulletin board systems. It is similar to ASCII art, but constructed from a larger set of 256 letters, numbers, and symbols — all codes found in IBM code page 437, often referred to as extended ASCII and used in MS-DOS and Unix environments. ANSI art also contains special ANSI escape sequences that color text with the 16 foreground and 8 background colours offered by ANSI.SYS, an MS-DOS device driver loosely based upon the ANSI X3.64 standard for text terminals. Some ANSI artists take advantage of the cursor control sequences within ANSI X3.64 in order to create animations, commonly referred to as ANSImations. ANSI art and text files which incorporate ANSI codes carry the de facto.ANS file extension.
BBS: The Documentary is a 3-disc, 8-episode documentary about the subculture born from the creation of the bulletin board system (BBS) filmed by computer historian Jason Scott of textfiles.com.
20 GOTO 10 was an art gallery in operation from 2008 to 2012, founded by Christopher Abad in San Francisco, California, United States.
FirstClass is a client–server groupware, email, online conferencing, voice and fax services, and bulletin-board system for Windows, macOS, and Linux. FirstClass's primary markets are the higher-education and K-12 education sectors, including four of the top ten largest school districts in the United States.
ExecPC is an online service provider started in 1983 by owner Bob Mahoney as the Exec-PC BBS. It quickly grew to be one of the world's largest bulletin board systems in the 1980s and throughout the 1990s, competing with the likes of Compuserve and Prodigy.
In web archiving, an archive site is a website that stores information on webpages from the past for anyone to view.
Boardwatch Magazine, informally known as Boardwatch, was initially published and edited by Jack Rickard. Founded in 1987, it began as a publication for the online Bulletin Board Systems of the 1980s and 1990s and ultimately evolved into a trade magazine for the Internet service provider (ISP) industry in the late 1990s. The magazine was based in Lakewood, Colorado, and was published monthly.
Searchlight BBS is a bulletin board system (BBS) developed in 1985 by Frank LaRosa for the TRS-80. LaRosa formed a company, Searchlight Software, through which he marketed and sold Searchlight BBS. In 1987, LaRosa expanded the software and sold it as shareware written for the PC in Pascal. The features of Searchlight BBS included a full screen text editor, a remote DOS shell, and file transfer via the XMODEM protocol. Searchlight BBS rapidly grew in popularity, and appeared frequently in Boardwatch magazine and at BBS conventions across the United States. Eventually, Searchlight BBS supported FidoNet, ZMODEM, Internet e-mail and telnet connectivity.
textfiles.com is a website dedicated to preserving the digital documents that contain the history of the bulletin board system (BBS) world and various subcultures, and thus providing "a glimpse into the history of writers and artists bound by the 128 characters that the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) allowed them". The site categorizes and stores thousands of text files, primarily from the 1980s, but also contains some older files and some that were created well into the 1990s. A broad range of topics is presented, including anarchy, art, carding, computers, drugs, ezines, freemasonry, computer games, hacking, phreaking, politics, computer piracy, sex, and UFOs. The site was created and is run by Jason Scott.
Sockington was a domestic cat who lived in Waltham, Massachusetts, United States. He gained large-scale fame via the social networking site Twitter; his co-owner, Jason Scott, an archivist and Internet historian, regularly posted from Sockington's Twitter account since late 2007. As of July 2018, Sockington's account had over 1.2 million followers, many of which were pet accounts themselves.
Aces of ANSI Art was the first group of artists specifically organized for the purposes of creating and distributing ANSI art. The group was founded and operated by two BBS enthusiasts from California, "Zyphril" and "Chips Ahoy", from 1989 through 1991.
Get Lamp is a documentary about interactive fiction filmed by computer historian Jason Scott of textfiles.com. Scott conducted the interviews between February 2006 and February 2008, and the documentary was released in July 2010.
Archive Team is a group dedicated to digital preservation and web archiving that was co-founded by Jason Scott in 2009.
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