This month on Open Apple, we sit down with Jason Scott, documentary filmmaker, historian, public speaker, and archivist.

We talk about the importance of a nuanced appreciation of history, the flavors of sadness in comment threads, whom not to trust with special data and the nature of humanity, and failing at life.

Don’t miss Mike Hate Sponge Delicate Snowflake Maginnis’s sigh to end all sighs. Join us to learn how to take care of your capacitors, how to count your cycles, and how to do TCP/IP on your 8-bit Apple II.

Want to troll your cable company, accelerate your IIe, or play Bomberman on your GS? Tune in and find out how!

*Note: This episode was recorded more than a month ago so some of the news items discussed are slightly out of date.

Documentary director and tech historian Jason Scott announced today that the raw interview footage from his most recently released film, GET LAMP: An Interactive Documentary, has been posted and is available for viewing over at the Internet Archive.  Generally speaking, these interviews are extended versions of what you saw in the film, or items that for whatever reason, didn’t make it into Scott’s final cut.  (This isn’t the first time he has done this – you can view hours upon hours of extra video from his first film, BBS: The Documentary, here.)  If you’re a fan of Scott’s work or just interested in technology in general, this footage, comprised of over 50 individual interviews, is well worth viewing, and after you’re done, you can go buy a copy of the movie.

According to this tweet from Jordan Mechner, the Prince of Persia source code has been successfully recovered!

The attempt to rescue the Apple II Prince of Persia source code from Jordan Mechner’s original diskettes is scheduled to happen today.  Digital archivist and indy doc filmmaker extraordinaire Jason Scott volunteered to fly out to California today to make the magic, and also conscripted 16sector’s Tony Diaz to assist.  You can read up on the background at Jordan’s blog and then follow the live, blow-by-blow action on Twitter with the #sourcecode hash tag.

Update:  Due to the continuing popularity of Jake Gyllenhaal’s recent movie, the PoP source code rescue project is now live-tweeting under the #popsource hash tag. (HT Ken Gagne).

Jason Scott has been hard at work filming his next set of documentaries.  As part of the process, Scott has been posting to his YouTube channel “teaser” clips and “test footage” from some of the interviews he’s been conducting.  Here’s one that might be of particular interest to Apple II users, in which John Romero describes committing the Apple II memory map to memory.

Get Lamp, the text adventure documentary from Jason Scott, is now available for pre-order. The film, which will debut at the PAX East convention in Boston this March, costs $40 USD plus shipping. The package includes a two-DVD set with dozens of interviews; interactive, branching paths; retro-style package artwork; actual text adventures, including Eamon for the Apple II; and an upgrade guarantee.

UPDATE: GET LAMP will premiere at PAX, but DVDs will not start shipping for another month or two.

Jason Scott, creator of BBS: The Documentary, continues his work on his next project: a documentary of text adventures entitled Get Lamp. Media distribution has changed much in the four years since Scott’s last release, and he’s looking for his audience’s perspective on how they want this next documentary delivered.

To that end, he has created an informal survey on his blog, asking potential viewers how they’d like to get their hands on Get Lamp. Do you want a DVD or a digital download? Are the extras as important to you as the film? Help shape the course of this project with just a moment of your time.

Update: This survey was completed on September 20th. Thank you to all who participated.

KANSAS CITY, MO — December 18, 2008 — Technology historian and documentarian Jason Scott will be the keynote speaker at KansasFest 2009, the world’s only Apple II computer convention. Scott, whose documentary about dial-up bulletin board systems was presented at KansasFest 2007, brings with him a comprehensive insight into the Apple II and its role in the development of the personal computer.

“I’ve been wanting to attend KansasFest for years,” said Scott. “That there’s still an Apple II conference going on after all this time is just wild.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Jason Scott, creator of BBS: The Documentary, recently created a blog dedicated to his latest project, a documentary of text adventures. The new site, “Taking Inventory“, is “a weblog related to the production of the documentary Get Lamp and the general subject of interactive fiction.”

A trailer for this film’s pending release is also available.

Jason Scott, creator of BBS: The Documentary, recently updated his blog with news on his latest project, Get Lamp, a documentary of text adventures:

I have finished going through all 120 hours of footage for useful clips. This is the most dreary aspect of the way I do these documentaries. I listen to an interview and clip out any statements, poses, glances, or spoken ideas that I think might at all have to do with the final work … I just checked my clip drives: I have 2,439 clips.

So the hardest, most drudgery-filled portion of the editing process is done. Having all these clips at my disposal allows me to start piecing together sequences and overlaps and putting together all the things being said … I’m now working on putting the clips into folders … and that’s probably another week or so, and then sequences in very rough form start happening. Eventually I’ll have stuff I’m showing to friends for feedback, and probably a sneak preview or two, and then working even more on the final product …

So rejoice, ever-present inquisitive types… progress is being made.

A teaser trailer of this documentary is currently available, as is this longer trailer: