ASCII by Jason Scott | Hacker News Reader

ASCII by Jason Scott

ascii.textfiles.com

223 pointsbookofjoe25 comments

https://web.archive.org/web/20260501220231/https://ascii.tex...

Jason’s work output is so prolific. Over the past 4-5 years he’s digitized the lifetime collection of magnetic media I acquired in a series of odd interesting events. So much slice of life nyc and weird cool music stuff that would have never been seen otherwise. Over 1300 tapes! All here https://archive.org/details/markpines

He is also just an absolutely delightful person to hang out with. Textfiles was one of the first websites I ever visited and getting to do this was a meet your heroes thing that actually went very nicely.

He's just awesome.

I’ve worked with Jason processing physical collections and he is one of my favorite humans. +1

> Just a little over ten years ago [...] a collection of 13,000 manuals now lives on the Internet Archive

That's a crazy amount of time, with a nice amount of manuals now publicly available, about ~3.5 manuals PER DAY, for a decade! Few people are as dedicated as Jason Scott when it comes to making sure information stays free and available, thank you a lot for what you, Archive Team and Internet Archive is doing for all of us!

> a collection of 13,000 manuals now lives on the Internet Archive

Why are we even doing this? This is just humanity giving free extra training to its future robot overlords. /s

Hopefully they'll be able to write better manuals.

Most of that was vintage test equipment AFAICT. It is nice to be able to query an LLM and say "how do I fix this boat anchor with these symptoms". These tools have been quite helpful for retrocomputing hobbies for me.

I follow him on Bluesky and he routinely raises money to buy things on auction and scan them/digitize them and upload them for free. One-of-a-kind concert tapes, obscure software floppy disks, random manuals, videotapes of random shows, anything old, he digitizes it and imports it into the Internet Archive.

Really doing great work preserving stuff that would otherwise be lost to time.

The current archive link is outdated, https://web.archive.org/web/20260515155930/https://ascii.tex... is more up to date with the May 10 post

Jason Scott is one of the good guys.

Indeed.

His podcast, _Jason Scott Talks His Way Out of It_, is an entertaining, informative and (often) touching listen, too.

For those able to contribute a bit monetarily, he's also got a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/textfiles

I love his podcast, and was able to back it for about a year.

https://textfiles.libsyn.com/

I had the good fortune of being able to hang out and watch him and some vintage Apple enthusiasts recover some source code for an old game. I have a lot of admiration for his dedication.

He's streaming live "right now". https://www.twitch.tv/textfiles

I'm the guy in the shirt!

Ha! This is so delightful. I vaguely remember chipping in some paltry sum on some early plea for donations for this, and getting a random manual duplicate in the post as a perk. Since then I've occasionally wondered how it's going, but never quite got around to looking it up properly. Somehow ten years passed.

Amazing work.

Maybe I missed it, but what were the manuals for?

What appliances? Or was it textbooks, or what?

See for yourself: https://archive.org/details/manualsplus

Where can I read about his stalker and a different person trying to unalive his family. He alludes to these in passing on the linked blogpost, but I can’t find more.

Latest post: Manuals Plus: The Wrap-Up — May 10, 2026

We'll have to take your word on that since it looks like it's being hugged to death. I can't even get an archive of it to take the pressure off.

There's a bad setting on my virtual host. I'm in conversation with the support team about getting it tuned up.

Met Jason Scott.

Absolutely uniquely good person.

a king among men.

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