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Comment by voberoi | Hacker News Reader

The author was laid off in 1984 -- presumably around the time this email was written: https://atariemailarchive.org/thread/on-atari-s-future-38.

[Shameless plug: I made Atari Email Archive and it's fun to peruse if you are interested in primary source material from this era. The emails all come from Jed Margolin (jmargolin.com), with his permission.]

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Fascinating threads in there... like discussions about the Challenger explosion and whether or not the tragedy was actually a tragedy (or a spark for a new Atari game).

> CIGGIES AND GAMES ARE SORT OF THE SAME... LITTLE SQUARE BOXES THAT TEENIES GET HOOKED ON.

So even then we suspected the addictive aspect of video games?

Yes, this was part of the public discourse around video games in the 80s.

See: https://atariemailarchive.org/thread/on-claiming-that-video-...

This is a quote from an Erma Bombeck article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erma_Bombeck).

> challenger explosion

https://atariemailarchive.org/thread/on-the-challenger-shutt...

Can we get these archived at archive.org? What a treasure trove.

How does one do that?

I think Jed's messages are probably archived -- text files linked to at the bottom here too: https://www.jmargolin.com/vmail/vmail.htm

> How does one do that?

Go to https://archive.org/web/ scroll to the bottom where it says “save page now”. Enter URL and click “save page” button.

I have not found a way to enter multiple URLs or tell the archive to crawl an entire domain/site. If you figure that out, please let me know.

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