Ask HN: How to search for old dated news articles?

Unfortunately there is an "event horizon" in that text after 1970-something was born digital (most newspapers starting using word processors in that decade) but earlier text has to be digitized at great cost.

For instance I roll my eyes at the A.I. safety discussions today that are ignorant of the similar discussions circa 1970, especially the inane "double-exponential" idea.

Also, Enron was preceeded by

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

in which somebody programmed a 360 to generate hundreds of thousands of fake life insurance policies.

I would in general like to say that being a researcher in our society is such an underrated skill. Knowing how to do legal research for instance is an incredibly important skill. Cornelius Vanderbilt, the richest man in the United States when he died in 1877, was wealthy because he overheard of the Gibbons v Ogden case which made certain monopolies illegal and allowed him to build his canal empire. Jeff Bezos learning about Quill Corp v North Dakota in 1992 and it’s implications for internet sales tax was one of the drivers for him starting Amazon.com.

The example he used was hurricane Katrina. There was a flood of stories unfolding during the event. But most of them have been removed and consolidated general information article. The resolution of the event is lost.