More than a decade after Aaron Swartz’s death, the United States is still living inside the contradiction that destroyed him.

Swartz believed that knowledge, especially publicly funded knowledge, should be freely accessible. Acting on that, he downloaded thousands of academic articles from the JSTOR archive with the intention of making them publicly available. For this, the federal government charged him with a felony and threatened decades in prison. After two years of prosecutorial pressure, Swartz died by suicide on Jan. 11, 2013.

The still-unresolved questions raised by his case have resurfaced in today’s debates over artificial intelligence, copyright and the ultimate control of knowledge.

Eine ORF-Recherche beschäftigte am Mittwoch den Kontrollausschuss des Landtages. Denn die Landesregierung ist der Ansicht, dass belastende E-Mails aus der Wirtschaftsbund-Affäre zwar nicht wirklich, aber „fiktiv archiviert“ worden seien. Damit will man die Herausgabe verhindern. Die Opposition wirft der ÖVP fehlende Transparenz vor.

The story of how MS-DOS became the industry standard for the 16-bit business computers at the expense of Digital Research’s CP/M is somewhat of a legend among fans of computing history. The event has been described in books, articles and documentaries, with most of them focusing on entertaining details such as corporate drama, back-stabbing and nepotism1.

Some of the more serious accounts mention one important detail of the story: DRI was late with the port of the CP/M to the Intel 8086. When IBM representatives visited in August of 1980, looking for an operating system for their upcoming PC, only the 8-bit version of CP/M could be demonstrated. IBM eventually turned to Microsoft and selected what became MS‑DOS.

In this article, we will examine why CP/M‑86 was delayed and, in the end, speculate how much that delay actually mattered.

Computer History Museum software curator Al Kossow has successfully retrieved the contents of the over-half-a-century old tape found at the University of Utah last month.

UNIX V4, the first ever version of the UNIX operating system in which the kernel was written in the then-new C programming language, has been successfully recovered from a 1970s nine-track tape drive. You can download it from the Internet Archive, and run it in SimH.