Thread by @textfiles

Stick with me, even if you don't believe me: In vintage and old-school computer fanboy circles, there were these ridiculous territorial fights over ... screenshots.

Not some specific screenshots and their meaning, or what the screenshots contained... but screenshots.

People (ok, mostly guys) were REALLY REALLY REALLY

REALLY

REALLY

REALLY possessive over "their" screenshots being used. Like, they'd have them up, and if you hotlinked, or even copied them, you were S T E A L I N G them.

Which, I get, I mean all that hard work of booting a disk or cartridge in an emulator, and then taking a screenshot and...

...well, actually, that's all the work was. So people were crazy possessive of these and they'd WATERMARK them, like they were the Sacred Papers of Zot.

This ridiculous, petty and useless grubby territorialism always rubbed me the wrong way, so once I got emulation working at Internet Archive, I wrote scripts that played All The Games, took screenshots, and just made them available to everyone, as many as they wanted.

My audience and reach has grown significantly since I first did this, so I am once again bringing attention to it. There's a dataset album called CITY OF SCREENSHOTS that has them:

archive.org/details/city_o…

And here are the flickr albums if you just want the art to wash over you. (You can download any you want from them, of course.)

flickr.com/photos/textfil…
flickr.com/photos/textfil…
flickr.com/photos/textfil…
flickr.com/photos/textfil…
flickr.com/photos/textfil…
flickr.com/photos/textfil…

And more!

flickr.com/photos/textfil…
flickr.com/photos/textfil…
flickr.com/photos/textfil…
flickr.com/photos/textfil…

In all, nearly half a million screenshots are out there, and we recently renovated how screenshots are being done so I expect many, many more to go up over time.

Thus ends, definitively, the most ridiculous fight I ever saw.