The Silicon Underground

Gary Kildall’s death investigation, or the seeming lack thereof, has taken on mythical proportions. Gary Kildall’s story seems to have that effect on people. Just like the story of Kildall allegedly going flying instead of meeting with IBM in August 1980, the story of Gary Kildall’s death on July 11, 1994 spiraled out of control.

While Gary Kildall died under unclear circumstances, his death was less unusual than early accounts made it seem. That’s why the investigation seemed to fizzle out with less fanfare than it deserved.

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Monorail was a short-lived PC vendor from the late 1990s and early 2000s. Founded November 2, 1995, they were the first company to sell a Pentium-class PC including a display for under $1,000. And Monorail PCs were the first desktop all-in-one computer that included an LCD rather than using a CRT. On top of all that, they assembled their computers in the USA, utilizing a facility in Kansas City, Mo. So what happened to Monorail? Why did it fail on July 9, 2005, less than 10 years from its launch?

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Raymond Edward Kassar was born January 2, 1928 and died December 10, 2017, aged 89, in Vero Beach, Florida. Ray Kassar was president, and later CEO, of Atari Inc. from 1978 to 1983. Atari’s parent company, Warner Bros, hired him as president of Atari’s consumer division in February 1978 after he spent 26 years at Burlington Industries, a textile maker.

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On July 6, 1995, IBM bought Lotus Development for $3.5 billion. Lotus had once been the second largest software publisher in the world and was worth $5.5 billion at its IPO. Its flagship product, the spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3, had been a key driver in sales of the original IBM PC in the early 1980s. By 1995, Lotus wasn’t trending in the right direction, but IBM had plans and thought Lotus fit into them.

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In July 1983, one of my personal favorite Commodore computer magazines of all time, Compute!’s Gazette, was born. An offshoot of the general computer magazine Compute!, Gazette’s first issue was dated July 1983 and quickly proved successful, closely following the trajectory of the Commodore 8-bit computers it covered.

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On July 2, 1984, Atari got a new owner. After a disastrous 1983, its owner, Warner Communications, wanted out, just a year and a half after Atari had $2 billion in sales. It went from being called the greatest acquisition in history in the New York Times to a toxic asset in about 18 months. Warner found a buyer in Jack Tramiel, the exiled founder of Commodore.

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The earliest dated article still active on Tom’s Hardware Guide is dated July 1, 1996. It was an article about CPU softmenus, something we pretty much take for granted today, but at the time was only available on select Abit and QDI motherboards. I’m not 100% certain that Tom’s Hardware Guide made its debut on July 1, 1996. In fact, I’m pretty sure it didn’t. But without a firm birth date, today’s as good of a day as any to look back at the very early days of a venerable PC hardware website.

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You hear a lot about Sinclair and Amstrad and Acorn computers. But when it comes to British brands, it seems like we don’t hear a lot about Apricot. But thanks to a television program that aired in early 1990, we know a fair bit about Apricot’s triumphs and struggles in the highly competitive PC market of the 1980s and 90s. It was on June 30, 1999 that Apricot closed its factory in Scotland and wound down its brand.

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For as long as I can remember, my home page has been about:blank. But for a good chunk of the 1990s, I would have done well to set it to altavista.digital.com. Here’s what happened to Altavista, the search engine that went independent June 29, 1999.

Most people remember Altavista as the thing people used before Google, if they remember it at all. But I remember it as the first great search engine, because I’ve done my best to forget what search was like before Altavista came along. So I was a little sad to see Yahoo shut down what was left of the first great search engine July 8, 2013. Read more