The Silicon Underground

The earliest dated article still active on Tom’s Hardware Guide is dated July 1, 1996. It was an article about CPU softmenus, something we pretty much take for granted today, but at the time was only available on select Abit and QDI motherboards. I’m not 100% certain that Tom’s Hardware Guide made its debut on July 1, 1996. In fact, I’m pretty sure it didn’t. But without a firm birth date, today’s as good of a day as any to look back at the very early days of a venerable PC hardware website.

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You hear a lot about Sinclair and Amstrad and Acorn computers. But when it comes to British brands, it seems like we don’t hear a lot about Apricot. But thanks to a television program that aired in early 1990, we know a fair bit about Apricot’s triumphs and struggles in the highly competitive PC market of the 1980s and 90s. It was on June 30, 1999 that Apricot closed its factory in Scotland and wound down its brand.

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For as long as I can remember, my home page has been about:blank. But for a good chunk of the 1990s, I would have done well to set it to altavista.digital.com. Here’s what happened to Altavista, the search engine that went independent June 29, 1999.

Most people remember Altavista as the thing people used before Google, if they remember it at all. But I remember it as the first great search engine, because I’ve done my best to forget what search was like before Altavista came along. So I was a little sad to see Yahoo shut down what was left of the first great search engine July 8, 2013. Read more

Quick: Who was the first browser manufacturer to hold an IPO in the dotcom era? Netscape? WRONG! Its competitor Spyglass beat it out, holding its IPO June 27, 1995. Its IPO did rather well too, issuing two million shares at a cost of $17 per share and raising $28.5 million. A week later, it was trading for $28.25 per share.

The same week Spyglass went public, Netscape filed plans with the Securities and Exchange Commission for its own IPO.

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In the wake of the dotcom bubble bursting, the record-setting startup VA Linux made a difficult decision. On June 26, 2001, it exited the hardware business. It was a curious decision but probably the right decision, because it survived nearly 14 more years as an independent company before being acquired by Gamestop.

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It was late and it was overhyped. But it was better than Windows 95. On June 25, 1998, Microsoft shipped Windows 98, and while it didn’t get the fanfare Windows 95 did, it was better than Windows 95. And if you want a retro PC box today, you’re usually better off running Windows 98 or, better yet, 98SE on it than Windows 95.

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On June 23, 1999, AMD announced its much anticipated Athlon CPU, the successor to its very successful K6. It launched less than two months later, on August 9, 1999. The Athlon proved to be the CPU that separated AMD from all of the other x86 CPU manufacturers who fell by the wayside. It was the first non-Intel x86 CPU that outperformed Intel’s fastest CPU at the time, a big change from years of playing catch-up to Intel.

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I’m just going to put this out there. Jay Miner is my hero. He designed the Atari 2600 game console, the Atari 8-bit computers, and the Amiga computer. But he made contributions to humanity outside of that, working on medical devices when he wasn’t making the greatest computers of whatever decade he was working in. He did this in spite of not being able to invent something to save himself, and he died much too soon, aged 62, on June 20, 1994.

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Windows Millenium Edition, or Windows Me or Windows ME, was released June 19, 2000. It was the successor to Windows 98 SE and Microsoft’s least successful operating system since the late 1980s. It was Microsoft’s last operating system based on MS-DOS.

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