Jason Scott Sadofsky (born September 13, 1970), more commonly known as Jason Scott, is an

America The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

n archivist, historian of technology, filmmaker, performer, and actor. Scott has been known by the online pseudonyms Sketch, SketchCow, The Slipped Disk, and textfiles. He has been called "the figurehead of the digital archiving world". He is the creator, owner and maintainer of textfiles.com, a web site which archives files from historic

bulletin board system A bulletin board system (BBS), also called 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 can perform functions such as ...

s. He is the creator of a 2005 documentary film about BBSes, '' BBS: The Documentary'', and a 2010 documentary film about

interactive fiction '' Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the ...

, '' GET LAMP''. Scott lives in

Hopewell Junction Hopewell Junction is a hamlet and census-designated place (CDP) in Dutchess County, New York, United States. The population was 1330 at the 2020 census. It is part of the Poughkeepsie– Newburgh– Middletown, NY Metropolitan Statistical ...

, New York. He was the co-owner of the late Twitter celebrity cat

Sockington Sockington (also known as "Sockamillion" or "Socks") 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 h ...

. He works for the Internet Archive and has given numerous presentations at technology related conferences on the topics of digital history, software, and website preservation.

Early life

Jason Scott Sadofsky 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). He later graduated from

Emerson College Emerson College is a private college with its main campus in Boston, Massachusetts. It also maintains campuses in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California and Well, Limburg, Netherlands ( Kasteel Well). Founded in 1880 by Charles Wesley Emerson as a ...

in 1992 with a film degree. 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.

Career

After graduating from Emerson, Scott lived in

Harvard Square Harvard Square is a triangular plaza at the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue, Brattle Street and John F. Kennedy Street near the center of Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. The term "Harvard Square" is also used to delineate the busin ...

in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was employed as a temp worker while also drawing caricatures for pay on the streets of Cambridge. In 1990, Scott co-created TinyTIM, a popular MUSH that he ran for ten years. 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, where he remained until 2009. He has been a speaker at

DEF CON DEF CON (also written as DEFCON, Defcon or DC) is a hacker convention held annually in Las Vegas, Nevada. The first DEF CON took place in June 1993 and today many attendees at DEF CON include computer security professionals, journalists, lawyer ...

, 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 PhreakNIC is an annual hacker and technology convention held in Nashville, Tennessee. It is organized by the Nashville 2600 Organization and draws upon resources from SouthEastern 2600 (se2600). The Nashville Linux User Group was closely tied ...

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 Beta (, ; uppercase , lowercase , or cursive ; grc, βῆτα, bē̂ta or ell, βήτα, víta) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 2. In Modern Greek, it represents the voiced labiod ...

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. In 2006, Scott announced that he was starting a documentary on video arcades, titled ''ARCADE''. Although he did not complete the project, all of the footage he shot for ''ARCADE'' has been made available on the Internet Archive. In 2007, he co-founded Blockparty, a North American

demoparty The demoscene is an international computer art subculture focused on producing demos: self-contained, sometimes extremely small, computer programs that produce audiovisual presentations. The purpose of a demo is to show off programming, visual ...

. 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," a group dedicated to preserving the historical record of websites that close down. Responding to the announcement by

AOL AOL (stylized as Aol., formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City. It is a brand marketed by the current incarnation of Yahoo (2017� ...

of the closure of

AOL Hometown AOL Hometown was a web hosting service offered by AOL. It offered 12 megabytes of server space for AOL subscribers to publish their own websites, and included a 10-step form-driven page creator called ''1-2-3 Publish'' and a WYSIWYG online webs ...

, the team announced plans to save 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. In early 2011, he was involved in Yahoo! Video and Google Video archive projects. Scott announced the creation of Archive Corps, a volunteer effort to preserve physical archives, in 2015. Scott has been hosting his own podcast called ''Jason Scott Talks His Way Out of It'' since 2017. Scott is the software curator at the Internet Archive. In April 2019, he uploaded all of the source code for

Infocom Infocom was an American software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced a business application, a relational database called ''Cornerstone (software), Cornerstone''. ...

's text-based adventure games and

, including '' Zork'' and '' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'', to GitHub.

Sockington

Sockington was a

domestic cat The cat (''Felis catus'') is a domestic species of small carnivorous mammal. It is the only domesticated species in the family Felidae and is commonly referred to as the domestic cat or house cat to distinguish it from the wild members o ...

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. , Sockington's account has over 1.4 million followers, many of which are pet accounts themselves. Sockington died on July 18, 2022.

Acting

Scott is a frequent collaborator of Johannes Grenzfurthner and appeared as an actor in '' Soviet Unterzoegersdorf: Sector 2'' (2009), ''

Glossary of Broken Dreams ''Glossary of Broken Dreams'' is a 2018 Austrian/American documentary film directed by Johannes Grenzfurthner. The essayistic feature film tries to present an overview of political concepts such as freedom, privacy, identity, resistance, etc. Gren ...

'' (2018), and the science fiction comedy '' Je Suis Auto'' (2019).

Personal life

Divorced, Scott was engaged as of 2017.

Filmography

* '' BBS: The Documentary'' (2005) (director) * '' GET LAMP'' (2010) (director) * '' Going Cardboard'' (2012) (editor) * ''DEFCON: The Documentary'' (2013) (director) * '' Traceroute'' (2016) (interviewee) * ''

'' (2018) (actor) * ''

Class Action Park ''Class Action Park'' is a 2020 documentary film about the American amusement park Action Park, which was located in Vernon Township, New Jersey and was known for the popularity it had among locals and the infamous for the poor safety record o ...

'' (2020) (interviewee) * '' Je Suis Auto'' (2023, upcoming) (actor)

Presentations

TEXTFILES, G-PHILES, AND LOG FILES: Remembering the 1980s Through ASCII
– ''

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
– ''

9'', July 2001 * Documenting the BBS – '' Rubi-Con 4'', April 2002 * History of Phreaking 101 – ''

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 __NOTOC__ Christian Wirth (born in the 1970s), 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 Code page 437, text characters ...

) – '' Notacon 1'', April 2004
Saving Digital History: A Quick and Dirty Guide
– ''H2K4'', July 11, 2004

– ''

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.)
– ''

13'', July 31, 2005 * Fidonet Presentation and Q&A – '' ToorCon 7'', September 17, 2005 * BBS Documentary Presentation – ''

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 PhreakNIC is an annual hacker and technology convention held in Nashville, Tennessee. It is organized by the Nashville 2600 Organization and draws upon resources from SouthEastern 2600 (se2600). The Nashville Linux User Group was closely tied ...

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
– ''

15'', August 4, 2007
Making a Text Adventure Documentary
– ''

16'', August 10, 2008
Keynote speech
– '' KansasFest'', July 22, 2009
That Awesome Time I Was Sued for Two Billion Dollars
– ''

17'', July 30, 2009 * /vimeo.com/7088524 Atomic Porn: What is the smallest particle of erotica?– ''

Arse Elektronika Arse Elektronika is an annual conference organized by the Austrian arts and philosophy collective monochrom, focused on sex and technology. The festival presents talks, workshops, machines, presentations and films. The festival's curator is Joh ...

2009'', October 2, 2009
DistriWiki: A Proposal
– May 11, 2010

- ''

18'', July 31, 2010
Archive Team: A Distributed Preservation of Service Attack
- ''

19'', August 6, 2011
DEF CON Documentary Trailer
- ''

20'', July 27, 2012
Wanted: Dead or Alive
– '' Webstock'', February 15, 2013
Making Of The DEF CON Documentary
- ''

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
So You Want To Murder a Software Patent
– Derbycon, September 26, 2014

Citations

General references

* Jason Scott, ''The Defendant'' (July 2001)
So You Got Your Lame Ass Sued: A Legal Narrative
DEF CON speaker. Retrieved 2004-11-19. * Jason Sadofsky
The ''Tribune'' Articles, 1987–88
* Jason Scott

, including Jason Scott's "Why Tech Documentaries Are Impossible"

External links

Jason Scott
– Personal homepage (Archived) * *
Collector's Trove of Podcasts
an interview with Jason Scott in Wired magazine online
The Whole Lawsuit Thing
– ''HarvardNetSucks'' account of the lawsuit. * https://web.archive.org/web/20170911133405/http://sadofsky.com/
leahpeah interview with Jason Scott

fsck interview with Jason Scott
*
Jason Scott talking about acting
{{DEFAULTSORT:Scott, Jason 1970 births American bloggers American documentary filmmakers American people of Jewish descent American people of Russian descent Creative Commons-licensed authors Cultural historians Emerson College alumni Hacker culture Historians of technology Horace Greeley High School alumni Living people MUD developers People from Chappaqua, New York People from Hopewell Junction, New York Writers from Cambridge, Massachusetts Internet Archive collectors