DMAN: Yes, they have English dialogue.

We have quite the stack of these in the basement that my wife, Tara, has retained from her childhood.

"And for the record, I got Tanya Huff's job at Bakka when she retired to write full time."

Funny, Tara always credited Tanya's retirement with opening up the space for her to get her job at Bakka. I guess she left a big enough hole it took two people to fill it. :-)

I have a bit of difficulty with a history of the Internet that jumps pretty much straight from e-mail to the Web, bypassing gopher (how can you have a history of the Internet and not mention gopher?! When Mosaic was first introduced it was primarily used as a very nice gopher client - that's where the content was.); bypassing Hytelnet (the first hypertext organized access to Internet content); bypassing Archie, WAIS, and all of the other early Internet information access systems.

It's not for nothing that the O'Reilly book Managing Internet Information Systems had a gopher on the cover.

Maybe my difficulty is because, while I haven't been using the Internet for 35+ years, I have been using it for more than 15.

Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music was one of the more famous recordings published and kept in print by Folkways (now Smithsonian Folkways). Fore those interested, there is a 24 part series on the history of Folkways that the Smithsonian has made freely available as a podcast. It includes 3 episodes (approx. 1 hour each) on Harry Smith and his Anthology.

One thing mentioned during the podcast, perhaps of interest to readers of this blog, is that the Anthology was made from the personal record collection of Harry Smith without securing permission from the copyright owners (the recordings were generally from the 20s and 30s, the Anthology was released in the 50s). These were not new recordings done to preserve the music (something Folkways was wont to do), but rather commercial recordings that had been made for profit and subsequently more or less forgotten.

It wasn't made clear in the podcast whether permission has been subsequently sought and in all cases granted, the music has lapsed into the public domain, or this tremendously influential collection remains, in some sense, a pirate bootleg.

For some reason, the idea of the little boy photocopying an issue of Spiderman and selling it to his friends didn't ring true to me as a parent.

Much more likely was writing and/or drawing his own Spiderman story (and maybe selling it to his friends). Equally a copyright violation, but much more common.