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Unearthed E.T. Atari Game Cartridges Score $108K At Auction
MojoKid writes: Hundreds of Atari 2600 cartridges of E.T. The Extra Terrestrial that were excavated last year from a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico collectively raked in nearly $108,000 through eBay auctions. Some $65,000 of that will go to the city of Alamogordo, while the Tularosa Basin Historical Society will receive over $16,000. Over $26,600 went to shipping fees and other expenses. A team of excavators led by operational consultant Joe Lewandowski unearthed the E.T. cartridges in front of a film crew. The high profile (among gaming historians) dig was the basis a documentary called Atari: Game Over, which is available for free through the Microsoft Store.
As a former financial analyst I could probably name 100 innovations in Excel alone.
Don't feed the idiot trolls. Microsoft = Bad is all they know.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
+1000
That was the start of AJAX and sophisticated asynchronous web applications. Without it we'd still be stuck with get and post.
Actually if you want to speak of what Microsoft has done for the web...
During the DOJ investigation, it was found out (by subpoenaing internal Microsoft memos) that the whole reason Microsoft created Internet Explorer was because they perceived the web as being a threat to Windows. That is, when they saw the rise of Netscape, they noticed how developers could write web applications and plugins for the browser, which ran on any platform, so developers were now free to target Netscape instead of their cash cow.
Microsoft was having none of that, so they explicitly designed IE to break the more advanced web standards, as well as introducing activex, so that if IE reached critical mass (say, over 70% of users) then they could render the web to become something that permanently belongs to Windows. After Windows 98 achieved that (by including it built in, which saved download time for dialup users, which were the vast majority at the time) then the world was stuck with IE5 and IE6 for about 7 years, which fully neglected to implement new web standards, and barely even supported HTML4.
So in other words, Microsoft deliberately held back web development for 7 years.
Meanwhile, guess what happened when AJAX did finally come around? Microsoft saw their freemail dominance in purchased hotmail fall flat on its face, as gmail's web interface was even faster than the copy of Outlook that most people ran natively on their desktop (the gig of email space was just to get people in, but the webUI was the real innovation there, which unlike hotmail, didn't require a full page reload every time you clicked anything.) Microsoft also saw Google maps completely wipe out their sales of MapPoint and Streets & Trips.