Larry Page's Programming Question in comp.lang.java from 1996 | Hacker News Reader

Larry Page's Programming Question in comp.lang.java from 1996

groups.google.com

92 pointsespeed30 comments

And where is Joseph Millar, the guy who answered the question? And the question was responded to, in two days, so its hard to know if he actually waited around for someone to respond or used googl..er..never mind.

Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2457332

Was going to post that too. This story was just on the front page yesterday. I can understand dupes of interesting/useful articles reappearing weeks or months later, but one day later?

Anyone got a link that works on what google groups considers mobile devices? On an ipad I get redirected to an index page with a hash-URL..

Ugh, that's some disgraceful link breaking by a company that should know better.

https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!search/%22larry$20page%2...

His Stanford web page:

http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20061108115703/http://infol...

looks like that Google logo was made in MS Word?

On one of my old systems, I have the code from the "google 2" crawler that used to be on one of the Stanford FTP servers.

I think this is it...

WebBase Overview http://diglib.stanford.edu:8091/~testbed/doc2/WebBase/

WebBase Archive ftp://db.stanford.edu/pub/digital_library/

WebBase Archive (old) ftp://db.stanford.edu/pub/webbase/

According to In the Plex, the first version of the Google logo was made in GIMP.

How did this end up in Google Groups? It obviously didn't exist back then.

Dejanews (which later became Google Groups) archived tons of old messages.

So, this is from Usenet.I hadn't even heard of Dejanews before, but Wikipedia (as always) filled me in. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Deja_News

It seems to odd to me that someone would be aware of Google Groups, but not be aware that it's basically Usenet.

At the tender young age of 27, I suddenly feel old.

Well, it is in Google Groups's interest to differentiate themselves from commodity suppliers of Usenet feeds, and they've done a good job of it, which has probably had a bad effect on Usenet.

Hey that was my finding :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2457332

Nope, mine, see this comment from two days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2452759 . Boom, I win ;)

Joking aside, I could have sweared I had seen this on HN a while ago... I cannot seem to find it, so I guess it might have been on twitter / buzz.

When I posted this link, I was not trying to make fun of Larry or anything like that. It was just an inspirational example of a startup founder working on his project, during the early years of the web, working on a new platform.

is he the real Larry? or just another one with the same name?

    From: p...@cs.stanford.edu (Lawrence Page)
    Subject: Q: Setting User-Agent Field?
    Date: 1996/01/07
    Message-ID: <page-0701962007020001@qwerty.stanford.edu>#1/1
    X-Deja-AN: 134550259
    organization: Stanford University
    reply-to: p...@cs.stanford.edu
    newsgroups: comp.lang.java

It's him. Google began in 1996, was initially developed in Java, and well, he's trying to write a web robot to visit pages.

Full headers at https://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java/msg/88fa10845...

same larry. page@cs.stanford.edu, in 1996

yes, that's me

Prove it's you and make Google's stock go back up.

Alternatively, get Matt Cutts to vouch for you.

I don't see Larry that often, but the next time we cross paths, I'll try to ask "Hey, was that you on Hacker News?" :)

Aha. I've now seen the somewhat-discussed green username. Too bad you can't fake a decades-old HN registration. :-)

Why should the real Larry Page have an old username?

And decades-old is not possible. HN isn't that old.

Wow! Just contemplating how times have changed.The guy Jospeh Millar worked at the now-defunct FTP Software, Inc.Java was new.There was no google to search for programming help.Linux was totally nerdy.Windows was '95.Redmond was not that important a place.It was not hated that much. How times have changed.

In my recollection, Redmond was THE most important place, and Microsoft was much more hated than they are today.

Damn, I shouldn't have missed that post back then ... :)

Yikes! I thought one should only be careful with racy Facebook photos and such but it seems like one's clueless questions on SO (or, God forbid, expertsexchange) may be dug out years later when one is famous.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com