The Silicon Underground

Medieval Europeans believed that the divine right of sovereignty transferred instantly from one monarch to the next upon the death of the previous one. This led to a saying, first used in 1422 in France, that translates to “The king is dead. Long live the king!” And in that same spirit, when the last patent related to the MP3 file format expired April 16, 2017, a few people said MP3 is dead, long live Mp3. And some skipped the part about MP3 living long, and just declared it dead.

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On April 16, 1977, Apple launched the Apple II, one of the first pre-built desktop computers, although it wouldn’t ship until June of that year. It went on to sell about 6 million units over the course of the next 17 years, making it the longest lived and most successful of the three prebuilt micro computers that arrived on the market in 1977.

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On April 15, 1998, Intel introduced its Celeron 266 processor. It was the first Celeron in a product line that lasted 25 years, but it wasn’t one of Intel’s finest moments. The Celeron was a cut-down Pentium II, designed in a rush as a response to pricing pressures from AMD. And it looked like a typical rush job.

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On April 13, 2007, Google agreed to acquire DoubleClick for US$3.1 billion in cash. Google had already been in the advertising business since 2000, with its Adwords product. Buying Doubleclick further sent Google down the road of funding itself through selling advertising.

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On April 13,  1992, Cyrix debuted its 486SLC CPU. Cyrix didn’t have its own fabrication plants so they relied on other chipmakers, such as SGS Thomson and Texas Instruments, to manufacture the chips. Part of the agreement allowed TI to make its own derivatives of the chips, and share the advances back to Cyrix. The 486SLC was really more a 386SX/486SX hybrid than a true Intel 486 clone. It plugged into a 386SX socket and had the 486 instruction set and 1K of L1 cache. But clock for clock the Intel 486 was faster in a fair fight, and having just a 16-bit external bus kept it from being a fair fight.

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Intel announced the 486 CPU at Comdex on April 10, 1989. It was an expensive chip, priced at $950 each in quantities of 1,000. I thought it would be fun to look back at what the magazines at the time had to say about Intel’s then-new CPU.

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40 years ago today, on April 9, 1986, Osborne Computer Corporation, one of the early makers of CP/M computers and a pioneer in portable computing, liquidated after three years of financial hardship. Its demise is generally blamed on its founder, Adam Osborne, saying too much about an upcoming computer. But that oversimplifies a longer and more complex story.

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It is hard for me to be objective about the Atari ST, because I was a dyed in the wool Amiga fanboy in the early ’90s. But the Atari ST was released April 8, 1985 and quickly sold 50,000 units. For a while, it looked like the future belonged to the Motorola 68000-based computers and the ST was going to be a big part of that.

Then again, since you probably are not reading this on an Atari ST, there is an argument that the ST was a failure. So it could be that I am grading on a curve. I expected the machine to be a nothing burger, and it ended up selling 2.1 million units at a time when 2.1 million units shipped still was a pretty impressive number.

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A lot of software advertises itself as working with a Hayes modem or Hayes compatible modem. What does that mean? And what’s Hayes? It’s a de facto standard named after a defunct maker of modems. Let’s talk about why Hayes was important. It was so important, you can even still buy a USB Hayes compatible modem for legacy applications today.

Hayes introduced a command set that started with the letters AT, for ATtention. Other makers adopted this command set and cloned the Hayes modem to various degrees, leading to the terminology of a Hayes compatible modem.

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Released April 6, 1992, Windows 3.1 was the successor to the very successful Windows 3.0. It wasn’t great, just like Windows 3.0 wasn’t great. But it was a graphical user interface that ran on very inexpensive ordinary PCs, and enough people considered it good enough that it more or less ensured the future belonged to Windows.

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