Jason Scott

No, my argument is that it’s a weak case, full stop, that hinges on Google growing from a 400 pound gorilla to an 800 pound gorilla by outcompeting their direct competitors in their core business that the company was founded on, making deals, acquiring other businesses in areas they needed to improve upon (or reasonably thought they did) and developing new search and ad products to expand their business. You can’t punish them for making a deal ex post facto because it was the winning strategy and their competitors turned out to be the greatest cultural lobster trap inventors[1] and the Windows company that has basically stopped innovating on the web the moment they stopped perceiving it as a threat (which they were so wrong about).

Google’s core business is search and advertising and they have worked from the company’s inception to acquire users and customers in both, successfully, and more so than their competition both earlier in their history and later and they have developed business partners along the way who value that continued business relationship.

Making deals isn’t illegal and businesses make deals all the time. The Sherman Antitrust Act declares contracts that restrain trade and commerce illegal, but Google isn’t restraining trade: they’re paying a fair market value for user acquisition and their largest competitors both know what that price is and are unwilling to outbid Google.

Up until 2017, Microsoft even had their own deal with Apple where Siri used Bing…

Much heavy lifting in design, layout, and verbiage for Infocom was done by a firm called Giardini/Russell, Inc. out of Watertown, Massachusetts. In fact, let’s just make it clear – a lot of what people think of as “Infocom” is in fact Giardini/Russell. For example: The Zork logo, the names Infidel and Deadline, and, of course, the verbiage of the advertisements I previously discussed. They wrote manual copy (some of which was then re-written by the implementors) and a pile of other stuff. The story of Infocom’s success, for all its considerable talents, is incomplete unless you realize this firm that contributed so much.

That's me a few years back, in http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2172

I knew putting these up would show some rough feelings. I've done my best to keep that to a minimum - I hope that'll be the case. But be clear - G/R is EASILY one of the most important contributors to Infocom's success.

If you want to translate (well, transcode really) from existing graphics
to ASCII art, your best bet is aalib [1,2].

I'm unsure if curses/ncurses [3] is suitable for game work, but it's another
thing you might want to look at.

If she has an interest in the creativity of character based art, it would be
best to talk to Jason Scott [4] but realize some of the archived art scene
text might be considered unsuitable for a 13 year old (even though I'm sure
some of it was created by 13 year olds). Also, Jason would be a good person
to ask about how character based graphics were done in old games.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAlib

[2] http://aa-project.sourceforge.net/aalib/

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ncurses

[4] http://ascii.textfiles.com/

EDIT: It also might be fun to show her Star Wars in ASCII animation

telnet://towel.blinkenlights.nl

Jason Scott is a treasure. People will be thanking him for his preservation efforts for millennia.

If you're not familiar with him and his work, check out his website (http://textfiles.com) and the excellent _Jason Scott Talks His Way Out of It_ podcast (http://ascii.textfiles.com/podcast).

Per the quote in the article, "people who are moved by them should consider donating to a worthy cause of their choice", if anyone is moved by these photos and doesn't know where to make a donation, you might consider supporting Jason's work on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/textfiles/posts) or making a donation to The Internet Archive (https://archive.org/), where he works.

(I'm not affiliated with Jason or The Internet Archive in any way, but I am (as you can probably tell) a big fan of both.)

It helps searching the name of the person who wrote the post:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Scott

"In January 2009, he formed "Archive Team",[12] a group dedicated to preserving the historical record of websites that close down. "

"Jason Scott was hired by the Internet Archive in 2011"

Or his about page:

http://ascii.textfiles.com/about

"In 1998 he started a website called TEXTFILES.COM whose original mission was to make available the thousands of BBS textfiles he’d collected in his youth, but which has now expanded greatly in all directions of computer history."

Recommended video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq70QKa7588

"That Awesome Time I Was Sued for Two Billion Dollars"

If you're into the ads, Jason Scott has a project going to scan all the old Computer Shopper magazines. I haven't looked to see exactly where things stand with that.

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5543

I recently started looking at ads in the old Byte magazines and among the things I was reminded of was how long the Z80 held on among the Byte crowd. And how much money (more apparent if you adjust for inflation) hobbyists and aspiring professionals were willing to spend on their hardware and software toys in the eighties. Having grown up in that time makes things like (a timely example) some people whinging about the cost of a Raspberry Pi 5 feel so irritating and inexplicable.