Comments for The Silicon Underground

Comment on Gary Kildall’s death investigation by Milan

Milan — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 14:04:07 +0000

“and the autopsy showed he suffered a brain hemorrhage”

“Los Angeles Times initially reported the autopsy failed to determine the cause of death.”

– which one is true?
– where did you find fact for first statement?

Comment on Why IBM bought Lotus by Jim Grey

Jim Grey — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 21:32:57 +0000

I worked for a large insurance company 2002-06 that was on Lotus Notes and MAN did everybody love that pig. The company built all sorts of internal apps that ran on that ecosystem. Then we merged with a larger insurer and we all had to switch to Exchange/Outlook. Oh the wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Comment on Apricot Computers: An underrated British brand by Jon

Jon — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 16:58:56 +0000

Apricot was a fascinating, short-lived brand. There’s a collection of their adverts on this site:

https://nosher.net/archives/computers/apricot_dtp_praccomp_may88

Which shows they dabbled in servers, DTP and the education market at various times.

As ever with PC clones, by the early 1990s it was hard for Western manufacturers to differentiate themselves or compete with lower-cost producers: a lesson Commodore also learned.

The “Troubleshooter” documentary is a wonderful example of the kinds of high-quality, educational and insightful documentaries the BBC used to produce. I think I might even vaguely remember it being broadcast, although I was a child at the time. They don’t make em like they used to, sad to say.

Comment on Windows 98 shipped June 25, 1998 by James

James — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 17:27:31 +0000

I remember it being immediately apparent at the time that the explorer windows were made to look like internet explorer but it was just fake so they could try to claim IE was a core component of the operating system. That aside, Win98 was a solid OS for its day and it was the platform of choice for PC gaming until XP caught on. For a time I dual booted Win98 and Win2k, that worked surprisingly well without requiring any third party tools, however I soon found that Win2k ran almost everything I needed and rarely booted into 98.

Comment on What went wrong with 3DO by Jon

Jon — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 07:19:12 +0000

The early 90s was a great time of innovation and competition in the console space. But the 3DO was just way too expensive in a price-conscious market (which, to answer simultaneously Neo’s point, was also one key reason the Sega Saturn failed in the US – the PlayStation famously undercut its launch price in a dramatic CES announcement). We now seem to be reaching a point where the RAM crisis is causing today’s consoles to reach price levels beyond the reach of consumers.

Comment on Apple Disk II launched June 1978 by Mark Penury

Mark Penury — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 13:54:35 +0000

Though, all that being said, Capitalism *still* worked!

Comment on The failed 3Com and US Robotics merger by Ryan

Ryan — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 03:01:27 +0000

USR’s ads were some of the most stereotypically 80s tech ads around: https://buttondown.com/suchbadtechads/archive/usr-password-modem-benjamin-franklin/

Comment on The failed 3Com and US Robotics merger by Shirley Marquez

Shirley Marquez — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:52:00 +0000

Palm did have an early smartphone, though, via the acquisition of Handspring. And they were working on a new OS that would have positioned them well for the future of smartphones. It took a bit too long to release, but they might have still been able to make WebOS a success if they had put enough resources into it; Android was not yet fully entrenched as the other smartphone OS. Two viable ones appears to be the market equilibrium point; the market doesn’t want a monopoly, but developers don’t want to have to develop for too many platforms. But then came the HP buyout, and their mismanagement of the platform; WebOS now lives on only as an OS for LG’s TVs.

Comment on AMD 486DX4 released June 4, 1995 by ilpalazzo

ilpalazzo — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 10:09:51 +0000

I bought a socket 7 VLB mobo + 486SX 33MHz, then a couple years later upgraded to AMD 486DX4 in the same shop and they modded the mobo for me for 3.3V

Comment on GE Widescreen 1000: Big time TV for big budgets by James

James — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 21:34:01 +0000

I take it this used a conventional shadow mask color CRT instead of the later standard arrangement of three separate monochrome CRTs? I wonder how good the picture looked, I suppose it would have been impressive at the time just by virtue of its size but typical 13” TV CRTs had a rather course dot pitch.