The Dead Internet Almanac Dispatch: Week of May 18

This Week

⚖️ 'Cut Off Their Air Supply' — The 1998 Trial That Ended the First Browser War The U.S. government sued Microsoft over Internet Explorer. It changed everything.

💸 $1.1 Billion for a Website They Promised Not to Screw Up Yahoo bought Tumblr in 2013 and slowly destroyed its value.

🎮 Unplugged: How a Background Server Shut Down Millions of Nintendo Games When the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection went dark in 2014, fans built a replacement.

📺 Unplugged: The Console Launch That Needed a Rescue Mission The 2013 Xbox One reveal and the always-online DRM policies that sparked a backlash.

🔌 2.94 Megabits per Second: The 1973 Memo That Wired the World Bob Metcalfe's memo at Xerox PARC that laid the foundation for Ethernet.

Now in Audio

🎧 The Day Bethesda Pulled the Plug on Its Own Launcher Listen: Podcast episode Transcript: Auto-generated transcript

🎧 Unplugged: When 77 Million PlayStation Accounts Went Dark Listen: Podcast episode Transcript: Auto-generated transcript

From the Cache

• Twenty-five years ago this week, Apple opened its first two retail stores. Retail analysts predicted failure; they eventually became the most profitable retail spaces on the planet.
• On May 27, 1986, Enix released Dragon Quest for the Famicom in Japan, single-handedly inventing the console JRPG by streamlining dense PC role-playing mechanics for a gamepad.

On the Desk

Next week, we look at the birth of the platform that swallowed the blogging world and defined the modern web's architecture. We'll also dig into the corporate mandates that created one of the most notoriously broken superhero games of the 64-bit era, and revisit an early windowing system that changed how we interacted with personal computers.

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