David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
The first Youtube video went live April 23, 2005. Titled “Me at the zoo,” it shows co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. You can still view it on the site. The same day, Youtube launched a public beta. The domain had been live since February 15, 2005. This was the humble beginning of something that changed how we watch television and how content is created and delivered.
Escom acquired Commodore on April 22, 1995 for $14 million. At the time, it seemed like Commodore’s long nightmare might be over. The Amiga had a new owner. Sadly, it didn’t work out that way.
The Timex Sinclair 1000 was the U.S. version of the Sinclair ZX81. Timex announced it April 20, 1982, and released it in July. It was a real computer for $99 way back in 1982. It sold 500,000 units in 1982, but only 100,000 units in 1983, so it was only on the market for about 18 months.
The Timex Sinclair 1000 sold for $99, and was the first home computer to sell for under $100. It was a very limited machine with 2 KB of RAM, a membrane keyboard, and no color or sound, and was discontinued in 1983.
Gordon Moore (January 3, 1929 – March 24, 2023) was a cofounder of chipmaker Intel Corporation. He proposed Moore’s law which makes the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit, or computer chip, doubles about every two years. Moore’s Law was first published April 19, 1965.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.