I initially found out about Jason Scott from Jimmy Maher’s blog The Digital Antiquarian–another guy who will get his own post shortly. Maher mentioned Scott’s text adventure documentary, “Get Lamp.” I found it on Youtube, and was immediately hooked. When you have 2 hours to invest in something cool, you can find it here. Jason Scott considers himself a computer historian and is involved in making documentaries about recent computing history, as well as various efforts to archive what we have today with things like Archive Team, and the Internet Archive. He’s incredibly passionate and smart about what he does and really well spoken. At this point, I’ve listened to hours of his talks which you can find on his blog. Everything he does is creative commons; so, it tends to be widely available. It’s so rare to meet people who are genuinely into what they do; but, when you do find those people, they provide such a breath of fresh air. It’s so easy to get cynical and think that everything is just a cash grab; it’s good to know that people like Scott are out there, driven to make cool stuff and with little regard for reward.
I highly recommend checking out his blog here, or taking a look at his BBS era collection of text files here. He put together a mini series about BBSs over the course of four years, and you can find it on Youtube, here’s the first episode. He also did a great film about Defcon itself which you can find here. One of my favorite talks he gave at Defcon deals with making tech documentaries: it’s pretty inspiring stuff and you can find it here. The highest point for me is when he says, “Perfect is impossible! Something IS possible! Do something!” So right! I often get trapped in the quest for perfect. If you’re reading this Mr. Scott, thank you for all your efforts; you have provided hours of education and inspiration.
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