Retro Computing Archives

Intel Celeron 300A introduced August 24, 1998

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing August 26, 2025April 15, 2026

On August 24, 1998, Intel introduced its Celeron 300A processor. It wasn’t the first Celeron, but depending on who you ask, it was the first one worth having. The Celeron was a cut-down Pentium II, designed in response to pricing pressures from AMD. But it turned out not just to be a budget CPU. It drew a surprising response from enthusiasts.

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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Internet Explorer first released August 16, 1995

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing August 15, 2025August 15, 2025

It was 29 years ago this week that Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer. It was almost an afterthought, just one of the components in the Windows 95 Plus pack, along with additional themes and a 3D pinball game. But things change, to say the least.

Dave Farquhar

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How many IBM PCs were sold

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing August 12, 2025August 15, 2026

When it comes to the question of how many IBM PCs were sold, the numbers I hear are all over the place. I’ve heard 3 million, 60 million, and several numbers in between. In this blog post, I’ll uncover the reason there are so many conflicting numbers.

But if I tell you IBM initially only expected to sell 1,000 units in its first six months after its August 12, 1981 release, you probably won’t believe me.

Dave Farquhar

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Andy Warhol’s lost Amiga art found

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing August 6, 2025August 6, 2025

Thought lost for 39 years, Andy Warhol’s pioneering Amiga art resurfaced in July 2024. Andy Warhol’s birthday, August 6, is a great day to look back at his pioneering digital art and how it came to be lost and found again. Details of the reemergence help to shed light on an earlier discovery from about a decade ago. And those details come from the very person who taught Andy Warhol how to use a computer. In this blog post, I’ll put these discoveries in context, and offer some thoughts from both an art teacher and a sales engineer.

Dave Farquhar

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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