General Retrotripping Thread

Salix Babylonika

to coincide with my launching of the official HH Usenet group, I figured I'd make a more general retro-web thread, too!

Did you know that symbolics.com (the first .com ever) is still up? 

Unknown

The user and all related content has been deleted.

Viani

tripping the rift

Irene

I just imagine Mr. Game & Watch tripping instead. >_>

Unknown

The user and all related content has been deleted.

ProfessorGator

I WARNED YOU ABOUT MR GAME N WATCH BRO

I TOLD YA DAWG

Gelzo

SAKURAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIII

ProfessorGator

Ridley is too big.

Here's Charizard instead. (laughs)

Manly McMacho

Superbitch: What even is that website? All I see are a bunch of statistical pictures that I don't feel like reading.

Salix Babylonika

I would much appreciate it if you didn't call me that.

Gelzo

It doesn't serve us any apparent purpose except as an artifact of internet history. The only benefit of keeping it up seems to be the ad space and company publicity.

lee4hmz

The company itself doesn't even really exist anymore. Remember that DARPA funding for AI I mentioned in the Garfield Minus Garfield thread? Symbolics was one of the beneficiaries (they built a commercial version of the MIT LISP machine, which was in turn based on the DEC PDP-10), and after that funding was pulled, Symbolics stopped being a thing pretty quickly, despite an effort to move into other fields such as computer graphics. (They're also, indirectly, one of the reasons Linux and BSD exist now; Richard Stallman's annoyance with them forking MIT LISP and Macsyma and closing the source led him to create GNU.)

Last I heard, it had pretty much been reduced to a single tech guy in the Virginia suburbs, servicing the few systems left in government use and selling the occasional NOS machine to the dangerously curious. They sold the domain because the shell company's owner died and I figure they needed the money.