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 territori ...

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 consi ...

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 race; as well as the st ...

of technology,

filmmaker Filmmaking (film production) is the process by which a motion picture is produced. Filmmaking involves a number of complex and discrete stages, starting with an initial story, idea, or commission. It then continues through screenwriting, castin ...

, 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 ...

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

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

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 hi ...

. He works for the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

and has given numerous presentations 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 di ...

, 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. It is consistently ranked among the top high scho ...

in Chappaqua, 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 produced by students at an educational institution. These publications typically cover local and school-related news, but they may also repor ...

under the title "Humor Staff". While in

high school A secondary school describes an institution that provides secondary education and also usually includes the building where this takes place. Some secondary schools provide both '' lower secondary education'' (ages 11 to 14) and ''upper seconda ...

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 busi ...

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston, ...

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

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 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. Events Common activities at hack ...

ference, 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 tie ...

6 and 9,

Rubi Con Rubi-Con was a hacker convention that took place in Detroit, Michigan from 1999 to 2003 inclusive. After folding in its fifth year, Rubi-Con organizers managed to destroy its name through creative website prankthereby preventing others from usin ...

s 4 and 5, the 5th H.O.P.E. 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 Advancement ...

s 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 arcade An amusement arcade (often referred to as a video arcade, amusements or simply arcade) is a venue where people play arcade games, including arcade video games, pinball machines, electro-mechanical games, redemption games, merchandisers (such a ...

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 computer programming, ...

. For their inaugural year, they paired up with

which takes place annually in

Cleveland Cleveland ( ), officially the City of Cleveland, is a city in the United States, U.S. U.S. state, state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County, Ohio, Cuyahoga County. Located in the northeastern part of the state, it is situated along ...

, 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! Inc. ...

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 websit ...

, the team announced plans to save Podango and

GeoCities 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. GeoCities was started in November 1994 by David Bohnett and John Rezner, and ...

. 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 launched by the multinational technology company Google on January 25, 2005. Similar to YouTube, this platform allowed video clips to be hosted on Google servers and embedded on to other website ...

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''. Infocom was founded o ...

's text-based adventure games and

, including ''

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

'' and ''

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'' (sometimes referred to as ''HG2G'', ''HHGTTG'', ''H2G2'', or ''tHGttG'') is a comedy science fiction franchise created by Douglas Adams. Originally a 1978 radio comedy broadcast on BBC Radio 4, it ...

'', to

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, cont ...

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 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 American Industrial Revolution. The original home of the Boston Manufacturing Company, ...

. 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 and appeared as an actor in '' Soviet Unterzoegersdorf: Sector 2'' (2009), '' Glossary of Broken Dreams'' (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) * '' Glossary of Broken Dreams'' (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, Vernon Township, New Jersey and was known for the popularity it had among locals and the infamous f ...

'' (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 Rubi-Con was a hacker convention that took place in Detroit, Michigan from 1999 to 2003 inclusive. After folding in its fifth year, Rubi-Con organizers managed to destroy its name through creative website prankthereby preventing others from using ...

4'', April 2002 * History of Phreaking 101 – ''

6.0'', November 1, 2002 * Keynote: The Future is Now – ''

5'', March 28, 2003
Apple II Pirate Lore
– ''

5'', March 29, 2003
100 Years of the Computer Art Scene
(with RaD Man) – ''

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) – ''

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 ShmooCon is an American hacker convention organized by The Shmoo Group. There are typically 40 different talks and presentations on a variety of subjects related to computer security and cyberculture. Multiple events are held at the convention ...

2'', January 13, 2005
Your Moment of Audio Zen: A History of Podcasts
– ''

3'', April 7, 2006
The Great Failure of Wikipedia
– ''

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 tie ...

X'', October 2006
Mythapedia
– ''STM'' (Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers) Innovations Seminar, December 1, 2006
Wikipedia, Brick by Brick
– ''

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 KansasFest (also known as KFest) is an annual event for Apple II computer enthusiasts. Held every July at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri, KansasFest typically lasts five days and features presentations from Apple II experts and pio ...

'', 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 Joha ...

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 Webstock is a web technology conference held in Wellington, New Zealand featuring a range of high-profile speakers covering a variety of web-related topics such as accessibility, usability, ethnographic design and development practices. Webstoc ...

'', 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 ''Wired'' (stylized as ''WIRED'') is a monthly American magazine, published in print and online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquartered in San Fr ...

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