Great cat and mouse story of a MS Messenger interoperability with AIM. I don't know if the punchline is how AOL finally made a change MS could not emulate (by exploiting a buffer overflow in AIM to do remote code execution to craft a response packet), or how MS bungled up the PR response to that.
Another classic description of early 2k organizational dysfunction of MS.
Random access vs. radix sort.
The Cardinals vs. the Ordinals, on where the boundaries between decades are. What does it say that despite reading so much nitpicking about this around 2000, I never knew that the ISO 8601 definition of decade is the one that's ostensible wrong.