idk that the government had first amendment rights… like any private citizen can record, but 1a doesn’t immediately mean the government can do anything, right?
He wasn't sitting there writing binary code and implementing all 7 layers of the OSI stack by hand, he was was gluing together pre-existing components. And the pre-existing components he had access to include two major email startups acquired by Google in 2001 and 2003, which were founded in 1995 and 1997 respectively. (Although he does have at least two patents for features and algorithms he co-invented while making Gmail.)
You're one of today's lucky 10,000. It was huge news at the time. The FTC considered not allowing it and the acquisition got delayed for months while back and forth public debate raged.
Easy to forget all the big moves that happened recently, especially since there haven't been (afaict) any major changes to service. I forgot the other day that Sony had bought Bungie, though it'd be pretty memorable if Sony announced Destiny 3 as a PS5 timed exclusive.
Massive media/telecom/tech companies get passed around between other massive media/telecom/tech companies so much that regardless of how much you saw the news at the time, a couple of years later it's tough to remember "Now who is it that owns Warner Bros. currently? AOL? AT&T? Netflix? The sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia?"
And Sierra. It would be amazing if MS released the source code to some of Sierra classic Hi-Res/AGI/SCI games, or the engines themselves.
IIRC, Al Lowe had retained copies of source code from the early Sierra days, and was planning to release some of it publicly a few years ago, but Activision shut him down. Maybe MS would be willing to reconsider that now that they're pursuing historical preservation.
the problem isn’t with centralized internet services, the problem is a fundamental flaw with http and our centralized client server model. the solution doesn’t exist. i’ll build it in a few years if nobody else does.
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