The Silicon Underground

On May 18, 1998, the Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft, seeking ultimately to break up the company. The case was controversial at the time and remains controversial now, but I would also argue the case is misunderstood today, and the Microsoft of today is not the Microsoft of the 1990s, and the Microsoft Antitrust Case of 1998 had something to do with that.

It’s popular to say today that the Microsoft antitrust case of 1998 was unnecessary and the market figured out how to handle Microsoft. But provisions in the settlement kept Microsoft from behaving toward Google the way they behaved toward Netscape and Lotus.

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The dotcom bubble was full of absurdities. A common business model was giving away software or services and finding unconventional ways to make money off it, a model we today call “freemium” and that may or may not involve spyware. Geocities with its free web hosting was a good example. But Cyberrebate.com took it to an extra special level of absurdity. It gave away actual physical merchandise and had a scheme to try to make it profitable. Cyberrebate made its debut May 16, 1998, and closed its doors exactly 3 years later, on May 16, 2001.

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Processor Technology Corporation was a personal computer company founded in April 1975, by Gary Ingram and Bob Marsh in Berkeley, California. Their first product was a 4K byte RAM board that was compatible with the MITS Altair 8800 computer but more reliable than the MITS board. They followed it up with a series of memory and I/O boards including a video display module. But their most famous product was a computer called the SOL-20.

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On May 14, 1992, Texas Instruments licensed Cyrix‘s 486SLC and 486DLC technologies. The agreement allowed Cyrix to use Texas Instruments’ manufacturing facilities, and for TI to create derivative chips from Cyrix’s technology. In the end, TI didn’t make as many chips for Cyrix as SGS-Thomson or IBM did, but TI did end up making interesting derivatives of Cyrix’s CPUs, including the 486SXL-40, the fastest 386-class CPU ever made. But without the burst transfer feature that Intel and AMD 486s have, none of TI’s 486s ended up performing quite up to par with an Intel or AMD 486.

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Kevin O’Leary, who calls himself Mr. Wonderful, is one of the most divisive stars of the reality TV series Shark Tank. Like Mark Cuban, O’Leary made much of his fortune in technology. But while Cuban is a dotcom billionaire, O’Leary made his money through a different model, selling software at retail. In this blog post, we will map out how Mr. Wonderful became rich. May 13 is a happy anniversary for him, but I can think of a major toymaker who doesn’t call him Mr. Wonderful, and doesn’t think there’s much of anything wonderful about him at all.
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On May 8, 2006, corporate and straitlaced Dell completed its purchase of Alienware, a maker of edgy gaming computers. It was a long courtship. Dell considered buying Alienware for four years before making the deal. And the tie-up of this odd couple has worked. At the time of this writing, Dell has owned Alienware for 20 years, twice as long as it didn’t own it.

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29 years ago, on May 7, 1997, Intel introduced its Pentium II processor. It wasn’t the first followup to the very successful Pentium. But the Pentium II overcame problems with the Pentium Pro that kept it from gaining more widespread mainstream acceptance.

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