Retro Computing Archives

What a bit bucket is

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing July 30, 2025April 5, 2025

Whenever I hear people complain about the save icon looking like a floppy disk and being anachronistic, I like to think about older anachronism. Bit bucket is a fun one. A modern bit bucket is a device that discards output, like /dev/null in Linux and Unix.

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.

dfarq.homeip.net

What went wrong for Yahoo

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing July 25, 2025May 25, 2025

Reddit calls itself the front page of the Internet. But for a good decade or even a decade and a half, Yahoo had as legitimate of a claim as any to the title of front page of the Internet. On July 25, 2016, Yahoo met an inglorious end as an independent company, selling out to Verizon for $4.8 billion. That makes today as good of a day as any to look at what happened to Yahoo, the first front page of the Internet.

Dave Farquhar

dfarq.homeip.net

Retro emojis: We had ’em in the 80s and 90s

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing July 17, 2025July 17, 2025

It’s world emoji day, which makes today the perfect day to look back at retro emojis from the 80s and 90s. It might surprise you to hear we had emojis that long ago. We’ve had them since 1982, to be precise. The first known use was on a bulletin board by Scott Fahlman, a Carnegie Mellon computer science professor, on September 19, 1982. They didn’t stop there. Whether we called them emojis, emoticons, smileys, or just faces, they proliferated throughout online life in the 80s and 90s.

Dave Farquhar

dfarq.homeip.net

Coleco Adam computer

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing June 5, 2025April 5, 2025

The Coleco Adam computer was a 1983 attempt by toy and game console maker Coleco to enter the growing home computer market. Critics and consumers looked forward to the computer after Coleco unveiled it June 5, 1983, but it never lived up to that anticipation. Coleco discontinued the Adam in 1985. Nevertheless, the Adam remains an interesting might-have-been.

Dave Farquhar

dfarq.homeip.net

When Chrome passed Internet Explorer for the first time

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing April 30, 2025May 26, 2025

It was on April 30, 2012 that Chrome passed Internet Explorer in market share for the first time. It took nearly 14 years for someone to pass the former afterthought in the Microsoft Plus pack to become the dominant browser. The two browsers jockeyed for the lead for two weeks, with Chrome overcoming IE for good on May 14, 2012.

With Chrome taking over, we traded one monopolist, Microsoft, for another, Google.

Dave Farquhar

dfarq.homeip.net

Webvan: The too much, too early dotcom

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing April 15, 2025April 25, 2025

Some dotcom-era startups were just bad ideas, and others were bad timing. I think Webvan was in the bad timing category. Today there is nothing especially odd about the idea of ordering groceries over the Internet. Several successful companies use some kind of variant of that business model today with success. On April 26, 2001, Webvan had an especially bad day. It pulled out of the Atlanta market, laid off 885 employees, and planned a 1-for-25 reverse stock split in a desperate attempt to keep its stock listed. This was just 13 days after its CEO, George Shaheen, resigned, on April 13, 2001.

Dave Farquhar

dfarq.homeip.net

When Microsoft retired Clippy

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing April 11, 2025June 13, 2025

Clippy was the unofficial nickname of the office assistant, a feature present in Microsoft Office 97 and Microsoft Office 2000. His proper name was Clippit, but nobody I knew called him that. Clippit, or Clippy, was inspired by Microsoft Bob, a misguided attempt to make Microsoft Office friendlier, more helpful, and easier to use. But most frequently, it was more annoying than any of those other things. On April 11, 2001, Microsoft announced the Office Assistant would no longer be enabled by default in future versions. Clippy was retiring. And there was much rejoicing.

Dave Farquhar

dfarq.homeip.net

Microsoft founded April 4, 1975

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing April 4, 2025April 3, 2025

On April 4, 1975, childhood friends Bill Gates, then 19, and Paul Allen, then 22, founded Microsoft, a company that makes computer software. Originally based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Microsoft relocated to Washington State in 1979 and from there grew into a major multinational technology corporation. In 1987, the year after Microsoft went public, Gates became the world’s youngest billionaire at age 31.

Dave Farquhar

dfarq.homeip.net

Anandtech made its debut April 3, 1997

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing April 3, 2025October 11, 2025

AnandTech was an online computer hardware magazine founded in April 1997 by then-14-year-old Anand Lal Shimpi. Shimpi remained CEO and editor-in-chief until August 2014, with Ryan Smith replacing him as editor-in-chief. The website was a source of hardware reviews for off-the-shelf components and exhaustive benchmarking, targeted towards computer-building enthusiasts. Its debut article, released April 3, 1997, was a review of AMD’s then-new K6 processor.

Dave Farquhar

dfarq.homeip.net

What happened to CompUSA?

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing February 27, 2025February 22, 2026

Readers of a certain age will remember CompUSA, a defunct big-box computer retailer. What happened to CompUSA? It went out of business, then came back as an undead brand, then went away again.

In some ways, CompUSA was the epitome of 1990s computer retail. It had huge big box stores with aisles of software and upgrades. It sold desktop computers, including its own house brand, Compudyne, manufactured for CompUSA by Acer. But the business model didn’t work as well in the 21st century.

Dave Farquhar

dfarq.homeip.net