Retro Computing Archives

JTS: short-lived maker of 90s hard drives

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing January 28, 2026November 16, 2025

JT Storage, aka JTS Corporation, looks on the surface like just another 90s hard drive company that got mauled by Seagate and Western Digital. But I’d say they were significant for two reasons: Their quality, and their corporate ancestry. You see, when Atari decided to close up shop in the 90s, it did so by merging with JTS.

The “JT” in JTS had nothing to do with Atari CEO Jack Tramiel, but the two companies were kindred spirits in many ways, aspiring to compete mostly on cost.

Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.

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What happened to Geocities

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing January 27, 2026January 27, 2026

Geocities was at one time the largest web hosting service on the Internet, and was the third most visited website in existence in 1999. It allowed its users to create web pages for free. It hosted at least 38 million web pages. After holdings its IPO on August 10, 1998, Yahoo, then the most popular web site on the Internet, acquired Geocities on January 28, 1999 for $3.57 billion.

Dave Farquhar

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What happened to Sun Microsystems

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing January 26, 2026January 27, 2026

Sun Microsystems was a high flying technology company for much of the 80s, 90s, and even early into the 21st century. But they fell fast and they fell hard. Although they were not a dotcom company, having had their IPO on March 4, 1986, the dotcom bust mortally wounded Sun. The result of that was on January 27, 2010, Oracle acquired Sun for $7.4 billion. And slowly but surely, Oracle is retiring parts of that Sun legacy.

Dave Farquhar

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Nvidia’s IPO on January 22, 1999

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing January 23, 2026January 23, 2026

The biggest company in the AI era held its IPO during the dotcom era, on January 22, 1999. That company was Nvidia, who offered 3.5 million shares priced at $12 each. It had been founded April 5, 1993.

Dave Farquhar

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Transmeta Crusoe CPU

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing January 21, 2026January 23, 2026

Transmeta may be most notable today for its $273 million IPO on Nov 7, 2000 being the last successful tech IPO until the Google IPO in 2004. But on January 19, 2000, Transmeta’s big news was its new Crusoe CPU.

Dave Farquhar

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What happened to Blackberry?

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing January 20, 2026January 20, 2026

In the late 90s and early 2000s, the gadget that said more than any other that you had arrived was the Blackberry, a little device from Research in Motion that let you read your e-mail and respond to it from anywhere. And then it became old-fashioned just as quickly as it burst onto the scene. What happened to Blackberry?

You might be surprised to hear the company is still around and that you can still buy Blackberry phones. But the device that made it famous, introduced January 19, 1999, isn’t retro enough to be cool again and isn’t its future. And it knows it.

Dave Farquhar

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AMD’s acquisition of NexGen

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing January 15, 2026January 15, 2026

On January 16, 1996, AMD closed on its acquisition of NexGen. It was a transformational purchase for AMD, as it gave them a way ahead after AMD’s own design team struggled to create a viable competitor for Intel’s Pentium CPU. NexGen had been the first company to produce a Pentium-class CPU outside of Intel.

Dave Farquhar

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NCSA: The unsung hero of Internet history

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing January 14, 2026January 14, 2026

In my mind, the most overlooked contributor to the rise of the Internet as we know it today is the NCSA, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. The NCSA is a computing research partnership at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Research at the NCSA is the missing link between what Tim Berners-Lee was doing at CERN and Netscape, the early dotcom darling. NCSA opened January 15, 1986.

Dave Farquhar

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When Gamestop stock surged 50% for inexplicable reasons

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing January 13, 2026November 6, 2025

On January 11, 2021, Gamestop stock surged 50% out of the blue. Yes, Gamestop, the brick and mortar video game store that once had about 7,500 locations globally at its peak in 2016, but closes hundreds of locations every year. And 2021 was no exception, with about 400 closures that year. Its closures get it mentioned in the same breath as struggling retailers like Joann, Forever 21, and Macy’s. So why did its stock suddenly jump 50 percent some random day in a year that it closed 400 stores?

Dave Farquhar

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Information Superhighway enters the chat, 1994

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing January 12, 2026January 12, 2026

Al Gore didn’t invent the Internet, although that was a running joke for a decade or more. But in January 1994, my parents didn’t know what the Internet was. Most other people didn’t at that point either. Al Gore helped bring it into the public consciousness by using the phrase Information Superhighway in a keynote he delivered January 11, 1994.

Dave Farquhar

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