3Com was a high flying maker of network cards and other network equipment. And then they disappeared with a whimper on November 11, 2009. What happened to 3Com?
What happened to 3Com?
Microsoft Windows first announced Nov 10, 1983
It was November 10th, 1983 that Microsoft first announced Microsoft Windows, a graphical environment for IBM PC and compatible computers. It arrived late and without all of the promised features, so it was very much like future Windows versions like Windows Vista and Windows 8 in that regard.
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Novell’s lawsuits with Microsoft
Caldera, the then-owners of DR DOS, sued Microsoft in 1996. There was some speculation at the time it was a front. Microsoft thought so. Because not long after Microsoft settled with Caldera, Novell, the previous owners of DR DOS, came looking for more. Novell settled the most successful of its lawsuits with Microsoft on November 8, 2004.
Radio Shack index
Radio Shack billed itself as “The Technology Store.” And at one time it was a consumer electronics giant. At its peak, it had more than 5,000 locations strategically placed so that a ridiculously high number of US citizens, possibly as high as 80 percent, lived within 10 minutes of one. This blog post collects and organizes everything I’ve written about this not-quite-gone, and definitely not forgotten icon.
Silicon Graphics founded November 9, 1981
Silicon Graphics was a legendary maker of Unix workstations, founded November 9, 1981. Its Indy and O2 workstations, powered by MIPS RISC microprocessors and SGI’s fabled IRIX operating system, are among the most stylish computers ever made.
The problem with Micron MT 4264 RAM
Watch a Youtube video about repairing a 1980s 8-bit computer, and you can flip a coin about whether the problem will be the presence of MT (Micron) 4264 RAM chips inside. MT RAM chips of mid 1980s vintage are notoriously unreliable. Apple, Atari, and Commodore all used them, and those chips didn’t age well.
I’ve seen them in Commodore 64s, Apple IIcs, Atari 800XLs, and Atari 65 and 130XEs.
Is AI crashing?
It’s November 8, 2026. I don’t know if AI is crashing. I don’t know if the AI bubble has burst. Not yet. Some people say it is. I remember the dotcom crash but didn’t blog about it, regrettably. Writing down my thoughts now will look foolish if nothing happens. But if something does happen, I’ll wish I had written something down to look back on.
Marx diesel freight train set 9613
The Marx diesel freight train set number 9613 was an early 1950s electric train set featuring twin diesel locomotives pulling 7-inch freight cars, sold through Montgomery Ward. It’s an attractive set and a very good example of post-war tin lithography, which was becoming something of a lost art at the time.
Upgrade diary: HP Elitedesk 800 G4
It seems like Dell Optiplex computers get a lot of attention, but I’ve had better luck recently finding HP Elitedesk PCs. These compete with the Dell Optiplex, and they have a lot of the same advantages and disadvantages. In this blog post, I will walk through upgrades I used to turn a used HP Elitedesk 800 G4 into a viable gaming and streaming PC running Windows 11.
What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO
Transmeta was the last big IPO of the dotcom era, launching Nov 7, 2000. Some analysts call its $273 million IPO the last successful tech IPO until the Google IPO in 2004. Transmeta didn’t completely fit in to the dotcom era, because they were a hardware company. But they were still a technology company, and if their plans had gone well, they would have sold their product to dotcoms, but it didn’t work out that way for them. In this blog post we explore what happened to Transmeta.