Jason Scott Sadofsky (born September 13, 1970) is an American

archivist An archivist is an information professional who assesses, collects, organizes, preserves, maintains control over, and provides access to records and archives determined to have long-term value. The records maintained by an archivist can cons ...

historian A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human species; as well as the ...

of technology,

filmmaker Filmmaking or film production is the process by which a Film, motion picture is produced. Filmmaking involves a number of complex and discrete stages, beginning with an initial story, idea, or commission. Production then continues through screen ...

, performer, and actor. Scott has been known by the online pseudonyms Sketch, SketchCow, Sketch The Cow, The Slipped Disk, and textfiles. He has been called "the figurehead of the digital archiving world". Scott is the creator, owner and

maintainer The technical meaning of maintenance involves functional checks, servicing, repairing or replacing of necessary devices, equipment, machinery, building infrastructure and supporting utilities in industrial, business, and residential installat ...

of textfiles.com, a web site which archives files from historic

bulletin board system A bulletin board system (BBS), also called a computer bulletin board service (CBBS), is a computer server running list of BBS software, software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user perfor ...

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 (IF) is software simulating environments in which players use text Command (computing), commands to control Player character, characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narrati ...

, ''

GET LAMP ''Get Lamp'' is a documentary about interactive fiction (a genre that includes text adventures) filmed by computer historian Jason Scott of textfiles.com. Scott conducted the interviews between February 2006 and February 2008, and the documentar ...

''. Scott lives in New York state. He was the co-owner of the late

Twitter Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...

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 The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...

and has given numerous

presentations A presentation conveys information from a speaker to an audience. Presentations are typically demonstrations, introduction, lecture, or speech meant to inform, persuade, inspire, motivate, build goodwill, or present a new idea/product. Presenta ...

at technology related conferences on the topics of

digital history Digital history is the use of digital media to further historical analysis, presentation, and research. It is a branch of the digital humanities and an extension of quantitative history, cliometrics, and computing. Digital history is commonly know ...

, software, and website preservation.

Early life

Jason Scott Sadofsky graduated from

Horace Greeley High School Horace Greeley High School is a public, four-year secondary school serving students in grades 9– 12 in Chappaqua, New York, United States. It is part of the Chappaqua Central School District. Distinctions Greeley was ranked No. 46 nationally ...

Chappaqua Chappaqua ( ) is a Hamlet (New York), hamlet and census-designated place in the administrative divisions of New York#Town, town of New Castle, New York, New Castle, in Northern Westchester, northern Westchester County, New York, Westchester Cou ...

, New York, and served on the staff of the

school newspaper A student publication is a media outlet such as a newspaper, magazine, television show, or radio station Graduate student journal, produced by students at an educational institution. These publications typically cover local and school-related new ...

under the title "Humor Staff". While in

high school A secondary school, high school, or senior school, is an institution that provides secondary education. Some secondary schools provide both ''lower secondary education'' (ages 11 to 14) and ''upper secondary education'' (ages 14 to 18), i.e., ...

he produced the humor magazine ''Esnesnon'' ("nonsense" backwards). He later graduated from

Emerson College Emerson College is a private college in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It also maintains campuses in Los Angeles and Well, Limburg, Netherlands (Kasteel Well). Founded in 1880 by Charles Wesley Emerson as a "school of Public Speaking, o ...

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 (Boston), Massachusetts Avenue, Brattle Street (Cambridge, Massachusetts), Brattle Street and John F. Kennedy Street near the center of Cambridge, Massachusetts, C ...

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. It is a suburb in the Greater Boston metropolitan area, located directly across the Charles River from Boston. The city's population as of the 2020 United States census, ...

, where he was employed as a

temp worker Temporary work or temporary employment (also called gigs) refers to an employment situation where the working arrangement is limited to a certain period of time-based on the needs of the employing organization. Temporary employees are sometimes ...

while also drawing caricatures for pay on the streets of Cambridge. In 1990, Scott co-created TinyTIM, a popular

MUSH In multiplayer online games, a MUSH (a backronymed variation on Multi-user dungeon, MUD most often expanded as Multi-User Shared Hallucination, though Multi-User Shared Hack, Habitat, and Holodeck are also observed) is a text-based online social m ...

that he ran for ten years. In 1995, Jason joined the video game company

Psygnosis Psygnosis Limited (; known as SCE Studio Liverpool or simply Studio Liverpool from 1999) was a British video game developer and Video game publisher, publisher headquartered at Wavertree Technology Park in Liverpool. Founded in 1984 by Ian Het ...

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 Computer security conference, hacker convention held annually in Las Vegas Valley, Las Vegas, Nevada. The first DEF CON took place in June 1993 and today many attendees at DEF CON include comp ...

, an annual

hacker con A computer security conference is a convention for individuals involved in computer security. They generally serve as meeting places for system and network administrators, hackers, and computer security experts. Common activities at hacker conven ...

ference, 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. The Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference series is a hacker convention sponsored by the security hacker magazine '' 2600: The Hacker Quarterly'' that until 2020 was typically held at Hotel Pennsylvania, in Manhattan, New York City. Us ...

conference in 2004,

Notacon Notacon (pronounced "not-a-con") was an art and technology conference which took place annually in Cleveland, Ohio from 2003 to 2014. Notacon ceased operations in 2014. The name Notacon became a bacronym for Northern Ohio Technological Advancemen ...

s 1, 2 (as a backup), 3 and 4, Toorcon 7, and

beta Beta (, ; uppercase , lowercase , or cursive ; or ) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 2. In Ancient Greek, beta represented the voiced bilabial plosive . In Modern Greek, it represe ...

premiered his

documentary A documentary film (often described simply as a documentary) is a nonfiction Film, motion picture intended to "document reality, primarily for instruction, education or maintaining a Recorded history, historical record". The American author and ...

at the 7th annual

Vintage Computer Festival The Vintage Computer Festival (VCF) is an international event celebrating the history of computing. It is held annually in various locations around the United States and various countries internationally. It was founded by Sellam Ismail in 1997 ...

. 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 arcade An amusement arcade, also known as a video arcade, amusements, arcade, or penny arcade (an older term), is a venue where people play arcade games, including arcade video games, pinball machines, electro-mechanical games, redemption games, mer ...

s, titled ''ARCADE''. Although he did not complete the project, all of the footage he shot for ''ARCADE'' has been made available on the

. 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, visu ...

. For their inaugural year, they paired up with

which takes place annually in

Cleveland Cleveland is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County. Located along the southern shore of Lake Erie, it is situated across the Canada–U.S. maritime border and approximately west of the Ohio-Pennsylvania st ...

, 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 Archive Team is a group dedicated to digital preservation and web archiving that was co-founded by Jason Scott in 2009. Its primary focus is the copying and preservation of content housed by at-risk online services. Some of its projects include ...

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

AOL 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, and a brand marketed by Yahoo! Inc. The service traces its history to an online ...

of the closure of AOL Hometown, the team announced plans to save Podango and

GeoCities 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 1 ...

. 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 The company Yahoo! ran several similar video services. Yahoo! Video, a video hosting service, was established in 2006. Later, the ability to upload videos was removed, changing it to a more pure video on demand service; the website became a port ...

and

Google Video Google Video was a free video hosting service, originally launched by Google on January 25, 2005. Initially focused on searching TV program transcripts, it soon evolved to allow hosting video clips on Google servers and embedding onto other ...

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, Inc., 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), Cornerston ...

text-based In computing, text-based user interfaces (TUI) (alternately terminal user interfaces, to reflect a dependence upon the properties of computer terminals and not just text), is a retronym describing a type of user interface (UI) common as an ear ...

adventure games and

, including ''

Zork ''Zork'' is a text adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson (programmer), Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company ...

'' and ''

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'' is a Science fiction comedy, comedy science fiction franchise created by Douglas Adams. Originally a The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (radio series), radio sitcom broadcast over two series on BBC ...

'', to

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

Sockington

Sockington was a

domestic cat The cat (''Felis catus''), also referred to as the domestic cat or house cat, is a small Domestication, domesticated carnivorous mammal. It is the only domesticated species of the family Felidae. Advances in archaeology and genetics have sh ...

who lived in

Waltham, Massachusetts Waltham ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, and was an early center for the labor movement as well as a major contributor to the Technological and industrial history of the United States, American Industrial Revoluti ...

. He gained large-scale fame via the social networking site

. 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 Johannes Grenzfurthner (; born 1975 in Vienna) is an Austrian artist, filmmaker, writer, actor, curator, theatre director, performer and lecturer. Grenzfurthner is the founder, conceiver and artistic director of ''monochrom'', an international ar ...

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) * ''

'' (2010) (director) * ''

Going Cardboard ''Going Cardboard: A Board Game Documentary'' is a 2012 documentary about the American adoption of German-style board games, and includes coverage of the 2009 board game event '' Spiel'' in Essen, Germany, as well as interviews with many prominent ...

'' (2012) (editor) * ''DEFCON: The Documentary'' (2013) (director) * ''

Traceroute In computing, traceroute and tracert are diagnostic command-line interface commands for displaying possible routes (paths) and transit delays of packets across an Internet Protocol (IP) network. The command reports the round-trip times of ...

'' (2016) (interviewee) * ''

'' (2018) (actor) * '' Class Action Park'' (2020) (interviewee) * ''Musings of a Mechatronic Mistress'' (2023) (interviewee) * ''

Hacking at Leaves Hacking at Leaves is a 2024 Austrian documentary film directed and written by Johannes Grenzfurthner. It explores various themes including the United States' colonial past, Navajo tribal history, and the hacker culture, hacker movement, through th ...

'' (2024) (interviewee)

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 ''Wired'' is a bi-monthly American magazine that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. It is published in both print and Online magazine, online editions by Condé Nast. The magazine has been in public ...

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 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 Digital archivists