Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
Atari Email Archive (archive of messages sent at Atari from 1983 to 1992.) (atariemailarchive.org)
3 points by leonim on Aug 18, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments


The e-mail archive of one Atari Engineer, Jed Margolin, who worked in the CoinOp division of Atari. Jed was a hardware engineer at Atari from 1979 to 1992, and these messages comprise his inbox while he was at Atari.

With permission, the owner of this site, Vikram Oberoi, curates the archive, including pointing at interesting threads. There was no threading in the VAX email system they used, Vikam links together the threads.

Neither Jobs or Wozniak are mentioned, they left before these threads. But there are interesting topics like layoffs, piracy, residuals, pop culture, babies, etc.

(Those babies should be into their 30s now. Wonder if any are reading here.)


great idea. I really hope they add a keyword search feature so one can browse topics of interest (eg Logo, by searching 'logo' or 'turtle'). Otherwise... wow, difficult to navigatge.


Actually the Vikram said he had initially added a search feature and it didn't appear to be very useful. He says:

   search is an awful way to curate text when your readers don't know what is interesting about it. This is obvious in retrospect, but it didn't occur to me until I showed what I built to folks.
Though there are at least 41 different tags that he applied to the threads and can be found here: https://atariemailarchive.org/categories

He talks about this in his post: https://vikramoberoi.com/how-i-made-atariemailarchive-org/

I originally heard about this on the Data Is Plural podcast: https://podcast.data-is-plural.com/2159594/12535597


I would be interested to see what an LLM could make out of this archive. How it might categorize the threads or how it might help make sense of it. Vikram's manual curation is the useful part. In the podcast, he mentions he would like to see what could be done with an AI and the archive.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: