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.

> 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!

The current archive link is outdated, https://web.archive.org/web/20260515155930/https://ascii.tex...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.

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

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?

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

Met Jason Scott.

Absolutely uniquely good person.

a king among men.