David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
On August 6, 1997, Apple and Microsoft reached a truce, to the tune of $150 million. At an Apple event, the two companies announced Microsoft invested $150 million in Apple, leaving everyone wondering why. The whole event had a weird vibe to it and probably was just as confusing today as it is now. In this blog post, I’ll explore what was in the deal for both of them.
The eBay domain name was registered 31 years ago today, on August 4, 1995. But the site we know today as Ebay didn’t launch until almost month later, September 3, 1995, under a different name. Auctionweb, the original name for Ebay, was a side project. From these humble beginnings came one of the few survivors of the dotcom era.
When Radio Shack announced its TRS-80 Model 1 on Aug 3, 1977, designer Steve Leininger thought they could sell 50,000 units. Tandy executives didn’t believe him. But the response overwhelmed the company, and 250,000 people put their money where their mouth was, paying $100 to get on a waiting list to buy one.
At the time, the median price of a Radio Shack product was $30. A TRS-80 bundled with a CRT display and tape drive cost $599 and was the most expensive product they had ever sold.
On August 2, 2000, a second-tier Linux vendor acquired a struggling Unix vendor. The merger received some press, but if you weren’t really following Linux at the time, it would have been easy enough to miss. But the merger of Caldera and SCO created a litigation monster.
It was 30 years ago this week, on July 31, 1996, that Microsoft released Windows NT 4.0 to manufacturing. The workstation version appeared on store shelves a month later, with the server version following in September. In many ways, version 4 was a breakthrough release for the technology. Let’s take a moment to look back at what made Windows NT 4.0 such a breakthrough.
Here’s a late ’80s memory you may not have thought about in a while. Do you remember going to the video rental store to rent a video game and getting the cartridge but not getting the instruction booklet? The reason video stores would rent you a cartridge without instructions dates back to events that started in late July 1989, when Nintendo sued Blockbuster.
Who did more than any other person in history to make computers affordable? My nomination goes to Sir Clive Sinclair, who was born July 30, 1940. And I’m an American who never used one of his computers.
On June 29, 1993, IBM released the first energy star computer, the IBM PS/2 E. The “E” stood for energy. But while it was undeniably more efficient than other desktop PCs, arguably it was a PS/2 in name only. To make the PS/2 E more efficient, IBM used a mashup of technology, including but not limited to borrowing technology from its Thinkpad laptops. To celebrate its green nature, IBM adorned it with a big green stripe across the front. Yes, the stripe was green, not the traditional IBM blue.
I’ve talked a lot about the advantages and disadvantages of old milestone operating systems. But what were the advantages and disadvantages of Windows NT 3.1, first released July 27, 1993? That’s a fair question, and there are valid reasons it proved transformational even though it initially did anything but take the world by storm.
ARCNET was the first commercially available local area network standard, beating both Ethernet and Token Ring to market. Conceptually, it had similarities with both, and because it was inexpensive and efficient, it was popular for a good 15 years or so. ARCNET was an abbreviation for Attached Resource Computer NETwork. But you’re probably using some variant of Ethernet to read this blog post. So what happened to ARCNET?