Babbage’s remembered

Babbage’s remembered

Babbage’s was a software retailer that operated storefronts in closed-air shopping malls. It opened its first store in NorthPark Center in Dallas on Memorial Day, May 30, 1983. By mid 1994, it operated 320 stores in 40 states, Puerto Rico, and Canada, but by 1996, it fell on hard times. Barnes & Noble chairman Leonard Riggio bought the company November 27, 1996.

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Why AOL bought Netscape

Why AOL bought Netscape

On November 24, 1998, America Online purchased Netscape, the pioneering web browser maker and dotcom darling, for $4.2 billion. In this blog post, we will try to figure out why AOL bought Netscape.

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Max Headroom incident of Nov 22, 1987

Max Headroom incident of Nov 22, 1987

It was November 22, 1987, that the most notorious unsolved pirate television broadcast happened in Chicago. It was the Max Headroom incident.

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How the Tandy 2000 doomed Tandy computers

How the Tandy 2000 doomed Tandy computers

The Tandy 2000 was aptly named. It was twice as good as the Tandy 1000 in nearly every way. But it wasn’t even half as successful. In this blog post, I will explain how the Tandy 2000’s commercial failure and its reliance on Microsoft Windows set the tone for subsequent Tandy computers and perhaps even doomed the whole product line.

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Tandy 1000 models

Tandy 1000 models

The Tandy 1000 wasn’t Tandy’s first foray into the IBM PC compatible market. That was the Tandy 2000, released in November 1983. But in late 1983, Tandy started preparing the Tandy 1000, a home and education-oriented PC aimed at the lower end of the market, to compete with the IBM PCjr. First released in mid November 1984, it became a bestseller and spawned three generations of Tandy 1000 models, surviving on the market until 1992.

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Push button telephones introduced November 18, 1963

Push button telephones introduced November 18, 1963

It was 62 years ago, on November 18, 1963, that the push button telephone, or touch tone phone, was first introduced.

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The rise and fall of Syquest

The rise and fall of Syquest

Syquest was a maker of removable hard drives. It was a clever idea that is completely obsolete in these days of high capacity USB flash drives, but at the time, Syquest drives solved a real problem. Founded January 27, 1982, they were a pioneer of removable hard drives for personal computers.

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Ira Velinsky, industrial designer for Commodore and Atari

Ira Velinsky, industrial designer for Commodore and Atari

Ira Lewis Velinsky was the industrial designer for Commodore and later Atari in the 1980s. He was responsible for the curvy “Porsche PET” cases, as well as the case design of the short-lived Commodore TED machines, and later, the Atari ST. Sadly, Ira Velinsky died November 14, 2000 of a heart attack while returning home from Comdex in Las Vegas. He was only 46.

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AOpen: The king of whitebox PCs

AOpen: The king of whitebox PCs

Occasionally you see a YouTube video or a vintage computer post about a computer branded AOpen, sometimes with an additional badge on it. It’s also easy to find individual components branded AOpen, including optical drives, motherboards, power supplies, and pretty much everything but floppy drives. In case you were wondering, it is all related.

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What happened to 3Com?

What happened to 3Com?

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?

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