ASCII by Jason Scott

crtasm

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

embedding-shape

> 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!

bityard

Jason Scott is one of the good guys.

xipho

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

ethanhawksley

The current archive link is outdated, https://web.archive.org/web/20260515155930/https://ascii.tex...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

NooneAtAll3

Maybe I missed it, but what were the manuals for ? What appliances? Or was it textbooks, or what?

rhgraysonii

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.

woolybully

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.

dcminter

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.

selectedambient

a king among men.