Jason Scott

Jason Scott
Scott in 2009
Born	Jason Scott Sadofsky (1970-09-13) September 13, 1970 Hopewell Junction, New York, USA
Nationality	United States
Known for	Archivist and historian of technology

Jason Scott Sadofsky (born September 13, 1970), more commonly known as Jason Scott, is an American archivist, historian of technology, and filmmaker. Scott has been known by the online pseudonyms "Sketch," "SketchCow" and "The Slipped Disk."

He is the creator, owner and maintainer of textfiles.com, a web site which archives files from historic bulletin board systems. He is the creator of a 2005 documentary film about BBSes, BBS: The Documentary,^[1] and a 2010 documentary film about interactive fiction, GET LAMP.^[2][3]

Scott lives in Hopewell Junction, New York with his cat Sockington. He works for Internet Archive and has given numerous presentations at technology related conferences on the topics of digital history, software, and website preservation.

Education

Jason Scott 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).^[4] He later graduated from Emerson College in 1992 with a film degree.^[5] 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.

Early work

After graduating from Emerson, Jason lived in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was employed as a temp worker while also drawing caricatures for pay on the streets of Cambridge.^[6]

Projects

In 1990, along with John Anthony Rescigno (who was known by the pseudonym "Trout.Complex"), Scott started TinyTIM, a popular MUSH. He resigned in 2000.^[7] 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,^[8] 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.^[9]

In 2006 he announced starting a documentary on Arcades, titled ARCADE.^[10]

In 2007, he co-founded Blockparty, a North American demoparty.^[11] 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 January 2009, he formed "Archive Team",^[12] a group dedicated to preserving the historical record of websites that close down. Responding^[13] to the announcement by AOL of the closure of AOL Hometown, the team has also announced^[14] plans to save^[15] Podango and GeoCities.

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.^[16]

In early 2011, he was involved in Yahoo! Video and Google Video archive projects.

As of 2013 Jason Scott was also listed as the curator of the Software collections held by Internet Archive.

Sockington

Sockington is a domestic cat who lives in Waltham, Massachusetts. He has gained large-scale fame via the social networking site Twitter. Scott has been regularly posting from Sockington's Twitter account since late 2007.^[17] As of May 2010, Sockington's account has over 1.5 million followers, many of which are pet accounts themselves.^[17][18]

Filmography

• BBS: The Documentary (2005) (director)
• GET LAMP (2010) (director)
• Going Cardboard (2012) (editor)
• DEFCON: The Documentary (2013) (director)
• The 6502: A Documentary Series (TBD) (director)^[19]
• Arcade: A Documentary Series (TBD) (director)^[20]
• Tape: A Documentary With Bias (TBD) (director) ^[21]

Presentations

Jason Scott was hired by the Internet Archive in 2011

• TEXTFILES, G-PHILES, AND LOG FILES: Remembering the 1980s Through ASCII – DEF CON 7, July 10, 1999
• TEXTFILES.COM: One Year Later – DEF CON 8, July 29, 2000
• So You Got Your Lame Ass Sued: A Legal Narrative – DEF CON 9, July 2001
• Documenting the BBS – Rubi-Con 4, April 2002
• History of Phreaking 101 – PhreakNIC 6.0, November 1, 2002
• Keynote: The Future is Now – Rubi-Con 5, March 28, 2003
• Apple II Pirate Lore – Rubi-Con 5, March 29, 2003
• 100 Years of the Computer Art Scene (with RaD Man) – Notacon 1, April 2004
• Saving Digital History: A Quick and Dirty Guide – H2K4, July 11, 2004
• BBS: The Documentary: A Preview – DEF CON 12, August 2004
• The History of the Coleco Adam (mp3) – Notacon 2, April 2005
• Why Tech Documentaries are Impossible (And why we have to do them anyway.) – DEF CON 13, July 31, 2005
• Fidonet Presentation and Q&A – ToorCon 7, September 17, 2005
• BBS Documentary Presentation – PhreakNIC 9.0, October 22, 2005
• ConCon: A History of Hacker Conferences – Shmoocon 2, January 13, 2005
• Your Moment of Audio Zen: A History of Podcasts – Notacon 3, April 7, 2006
• The Great Failure of Wikipedia – Notacon 3, April 8, 2006
• Retrocomputing (with Sam Nitzberg, Cheshire Catalyst, Sellam Ismail) – H.O.P.E. Number Six, July 2006
• Underground Documentaries: The Art of the Interview and the Access (with Julien McArdle) – H.O.P.E. Number Six, July 2006
• Wheel of Internet Knowledge – Phreaknic X, October 2006
• Mythapedia – STM (Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers) Innovations Seminar, December 1, 2006
• Wikipedia, Brick by Brick – Notacon 4, April 27, 2007
• The Edge of Forever – Making Computer History – DEF CON 15, August 4, 2007
• Making a Text Adventure Documentary – DEF CON 16, August 10, 2008
• Keynote speech – KansasFest, July 22, 2009
• That Awesome Time I Was Sued for Two Billion Dollars – DEF CON 17, July 30, 2009
• Atomic Porn: What is the smallest particle of erotica? – Arse Elektronika 2009, October 2, 2009
• DistriWiki: A Proposal – May 11, 2010
• You're Stealing It Wrong! 30 Years of Inter-Pirate Battles - DEF CON 18, July 31, 2010
• Archive Team: A Distributed Preservation of Service Attack - DEF CON 19, August 6, 2011
• DEF CON Documentary Trailer - DEF CON 20, July 27, 2012
• Wanted: Dead or Alive – Webstock, February 15, 2013
• Making Of The DEF CON Documentary - DEF CON 21, August 2, 2013
• From COLO to YOLO: Confessions Of The Angriest Archivist — Bacon, May 16, 2014
• Thwarting the Peasants: A Guided and Rambunctious Tour Through the 2600 DeCSS Legal Files – HOPE X, July 19, 2014^[22]
• So You Want To Murder a Software Patent – Derbycon, September 26, 2014^[23]

See also

• Archive Team

Notes

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Jason Scott Sadofsky.

• Jason Scott – Personal homepage
• Jason Scott Sadofsky at the Internet Movie Database
• Collector's Trove of Podcasts, an interview with Jason Scott in Wired magazine online
• The Whole Lawsuit Thing – HarvardNetSucks account of the lawsuit.
• http://www.sadofsky.com/
• leahpeah interview with Jason Scott
• fsck interview with Jason Scott
• Jason Scott critiquing Wikipedia, 2006 on Vimeo