Our guest on the show today is Jason Scott, computer historian and adjunct archivist at the Internet Archives, a nonprofit founded in 1996 to save a copy of every Web page ever posted. He's also responsible for the Netscape GIF graveyard you see above. Also related: "under construction" GIFs!

We want to hear all about the 500,000 books scanned so far in the Archive warehouse, but we'll also talk to him about the Wayback Machine, a tool that lets you click through snapshots of Web sites along a timeline--check out CNET back in October 1996!

The Archive's book-scanning division is the company's foremost project with donated texts making up a big portion of the collection, but the Web site also preserves live music footage, original audio recordings, and various moving images clipped from history, like this compendium of news footage documenting various news organizations' coverage of the September 11 attacks over the course of seven days.

We have a lot of topics to discuss with Jason, including his personal project to rescue data saved on floppy discs (we'll explain what those are in the show, kids) and his personal vendetta against Wikipedia. But we only have 20 minutes for the interview, so expect to see him back on the show in the future.

The 404 Digest for Episode 889

Is this the end for books? Internet archivist seeks 1 of every book written. Rescuing floppy disks, by Jason Scott. The great failure of Wikipedia, by Jason Scott. Ticketmaster tells you where your Facebook Friends sit. CorporateTwits--Trolling goes corporate How a Tweet Led to a full steak dinner delivered to the airport. Netscape GIF Graveyard Under construction GIF Graveyard

Episode 889 Subscribe in iTunes (audio) | Subscribe in iTunes (video) | Subscribe in RSS Audio | Subscribe in RSS Video… Read more

'Get Lamp' illuminates the text adventure game

Jason Scott's first documentary in 2005 was about bulletin board systems (BBSs), which were in a sense the PC world's parallel evolution of the early Internet. This documentary, really more a multi-disc series of interviews with BBS pioneers than a documentary film as such, brought back to me my early years in personal computing and my subsequent forays into shareware software development through the mid-1990s.

Now, Scott has tackled a subject from roughly the same era: the text adventure game. My involvement here was more peripheral but no less a part of my memories.

As his new "… Read more

The cat with more than 500,000 Twitter followers

Rudy the Parrot hates him.

Last week, Rudy tweeted: "They can try but they will never get to me. Birds live twice as long as cats, sometimes longer. @Sockington will perish."

I am sure that is true. However, whereas in January Sockington had 10,000 Twitter followers, now there are more than 500,000. Rudy is stuck on 1,573.

Sockington is, as you have probably guessed, a cat. One extremely popular cat.

He is the cat that belongs to Jason Scott, a man with remarkable sideburns who is the brains behind, amongst other things, Textfiles.com. Sockington'… Read more