Commodore 128 introduced Jan 5, 1985

Commodore introduced its final 8 bit computer, the Commodore 128, on January 5, 1985 at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show (CES). It was an unusual and and often misunderstood machine. I have never seen another product subject to so much armchair quarterback. On its birthday, let’s take a look at what this computer was and why it was built the way it was.

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Microsoft Bob: Microsoft’s biggest flop of the 1990s

Microsoft Bob: Microsoft’s biggest flop of the 1990s

It was January 1995. Microsoft was riding high. Windows 3.1 had sold well. The interim replacement, Windows 3.11, was selling well. The industry was abuzz for the upcoming Windows 95, expected sometime later in the year. Microsoft was in a golden era, a time when nothing could go wrong for them. And then they released Microsoft Bob. They should have named it Microsoft Bomb, because it bombed. But if you take one letter out of Bomb, you get Bob. So they almost got it right.

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The First Microsoft Product

The First Microsoft Product

On January 2, 1975, Microsoft announced Altair Basic, their first product. It was a programming language for the MITS Altair 8800 computer, a product that let people write their own software for the new computer. The makers of the computer licensed Altair Basic on July 22, 1975, and sold $16,005 worth of product by the end of the year.

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Windows for Workgroups 3.11

Windows for Workgroups 3.11

Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was a minor-ish revision of Windows 3.1 released December 31, 1993. Windows 95 was still 20 months away and IBM was threatening to make a dent in the 32-bit OS market with OS/2, so Microsoft backported some of the Windows 95 code to Windows 3.1 to make it more 32-bit as a stopgap measure.

But the user experience overall was much more like Windows 3.1 than Windows 95. The enhancements were mostly under the hood.

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What happened to Abit motherboards

What happened to Abit motherboards

At the end of the year in 2008, one of the most legendary motherboard manufacturers of all time sadly went out of business. I am talking about Abit. What happened to Abit motherboards? A combination of factors took it down, including declining quality, loss of a key engineer, and a good old-fashioned scandal.

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1984: The last perfect year for 8-bit home computers

1984: The last perfect year for 8-bit home computers

The Register published an article called Christmas 1984: the last hurrah for 8 bit home computers. The consensus on social media was it wasn’t the last hurrah and I agree with that. But something did change after 1984. Let’s explore why I think it’s better to call 1984 the last perfect year for 8-bit home computers.

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Time names the computer its person of the year, 1982

Time names the computer its person of the year, 1982

On December 26, 1982, Time magazine selected the computer as its person (or in this case, Machine) of the Year. It was the first time since its 1927 inception that Time‘s editors selected a non-human recipient for the award. The planet Earth was the second, in 1988. Prior to 1999, Time called it Man of the Year.

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The first web server

The first web server

Late December 1990 was a pivotal time, although none of us realized it for a few years. Tim Berners-Lee, A British computer scientist working in Switzerland, was working on what became the World Wide Web. Over the course of a few months, he invented HTML, the web browser, and the web server, to make it easier to share information. Sometime in late December, the first web server reached a usable state. By some accounts it was December 20, 1990. By at least one account I found, it was December 25.

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The Egghead breach of 2000

The Egghead breach of 2000

It was 25 years ago, December 22, 2000, that Egghead’s website, egghead.com, was hacked, exposing 3 and 1/2 million credit card numbers. This incident raised a question we’ve been asking ever since. How do we know that our payment information is safe?

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What happened to Maxtor hard drives

What happened to Maxtor hard drives

On December 21, 2005, Seagate announced a $1.8 billion agreement to acquire rival Maxtor. The deal closed May 22, 2006. Seagate then proceeded to RIF 6,000 former Maxtor employees, half the former company’s workforce.

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