The Silicon Underground

Eagle Computer: The rise and fall of an early PC clone

2026-06-08T11:00:06Z

When it comes to 80s computer brands, few flew as high as Eagle Computer flew in 1983. The aptly named company was selling 12,000 computers a month and had been doubling sales every quarter under the leadership of a talented

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First Commodore PET sold, June 5, 1977

2026-06-05T22:15:51Z

On June 5, 1977, at the summer Consumer Electronics Show, Commodore had its PET 2001 personal computer on display after showing a prototype at the January 1977 show. Chuck Peddle said Commodore took its first distributor order on that day,

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AMD 486DX4 released June 4, 1995

2026-06-04T11:10:04Z

On June 4, 1995, AMD released its DX4 CPU, about six months after Intel released its DX4 CPUs. The AMD CPUs weren’t quite as fast as Intel’s DX4s, but they proved very popular because of their value for money. While

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GE Widescreen 1000: Big time TV for big budgets

2026-06-03T11:10:05Z

The GE Widescreen 1000 was a big time TV for big time budgets in an era of excess, with the tagline “This is GE Performance Television.” Introduced in June 1978, it cost about 3/4 as much as a family sedan

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Cyrix 486DLC CPU: Introduced June 1992

2026-06-02T11:07:07Z

In the first week of June 1992, Cyrix debuted its 486DLC CPU. Cyrix didn’t have its own fabrication plants so they made arrangements with Texas Instruments to manufacture the chips in May 1992. Part of the agreement allowed TI to

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Intel 8088s and non-Intel non-clones

2026-06-01T11:10:05Z

The Intel 8088 CPU made its debut June 1, 1978. It rose to fame as the CPU powering the IBM PC, PC/XT, and tens of millions of PC and XT clones from the 1980s. But did you know Intel wasn’t

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Why people say CRTs don’t have pixels

2025-11-28T01:08:57Z

I keep hearing people say that CRTs don’t have pixels. That is incorrect. We talked about pixels all the time in the 1980s when CRTs were all we had. In this blog post, I will try to clear up the

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DR DOS: Revenge of CP/M

2026-05-29T11:10:06Z

DR DOS was a third party clone of MS DOS that developed a well-deserved niche following in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Even though it was first released May 28, 1988, its copyright date of 1976 suggests some historical

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AMD K6-2 released May 28, 1998

2026-05-27T11:11:33Z

AMD launched its K6-2 microprocessor on May 28, 1998, a little over a year after its predecessor, the K6. The K6-2 built upon the K6, increasing performance to better compete with the Pentium II. Since it still used the Socket

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Bill Gates’ Internet Tidal Wave Microsoft memo

2026-05-27T11:00:09Z

30 years ago today, on May 26, 1995, Bill Gates wrote a company memo to Microsoft. It was something he did every few years, outlining the company’s top priority. But this one was different. It was a five-alarm fire titled

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