The Silicon Underground

GE Widescreen 1000: Big time TV for big budgets

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 11:00:54 +0000

The GE Widescreen 1000 was a big time TV for big time budgets in an era of excess, with the tagline “This is GE Performance Television.” Introduced in June 1978, it cost about 3/4 as much as a family sedan

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Cyrix 486DLC CPU: Introduced June 1992

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 11:00:09 +0000

In the first week of June 1992, Cyrix debuted its 486DLC CPU. Cyrix didn’t have its own fabrication plants so they made arrangements with Texas Instruments to manufacture the chips in May 1992. Part of the agreement allowed TI to

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Intel 8088s and non-Intel non-clones

Dave Farquhar — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 11:00:13 +0000

The Intel 8088 CPU made its debut June 1, 1978. It rose to fame as the CPU powering the IBM PC, PC/XT, and tens of millions of PC and XT clones from the 1980s. But did you know Intel wasn’t

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Why people say CRTs don’t have pixels

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 29 May 2026 11:00:59 +0000

I keep hearing people say that CRTs don’t have pixels. That is incorrect. We talked about pixels all the time in the 1980s when CRTs were all we had. In this blog post, I will try to clear up the

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DR DOS: Revenge of CP/M

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 29 May 2026 11:00:33 +0000

DR DOS was a third party clone of MS DOS that developed a well-deserved niche following in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Even though it was first released May 28, 1988, its copyright date of 1976 suggests some historical

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AMD K6-2 released May 28, 1998

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 27 May 2026 11:00:16 +0000

AMD launched its K6-2 microprocessor on May 28, 1998, a little over a year after its predecessor, the K6. The K6-2 built upon the K6, increasing performance to better compete with the Pentium II. Since it still used the Socket

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Bill Gates’ Internet Tidal Wave Microsoft memo

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 27 May 2026 11:00:05 +0000

30 years ago today, on May 26, 1995, Bill Gates wrote a company memo to Microsoft. It was something he did every few years, outlining the company’s top priority. But this one was different. It was a five-alarm fire titled

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What happened to Tandy computers

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 26 May 2026 11:00:50 +0000

What happened to Tandy computers? Tandy was a pioneer in the personal computer industry, one of three companies that introduced pre-built, ready to run computers in 1977. And for about 12 years, they were a force to be reckoned with.

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Quantum Link: AOL before it was AOL

Dave Farquhar — Mon, 25 May 2026 11:00:15 +0000

I used AOL before it was AOL. And if you had a Commodore and a modem in the 1980s, you may have too. On May 24, 1985, Control Video reorganized and became Quantumlink, or Q-Link for short, on its way

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Advantages and disadvantages of Windows 3.0

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 22 May 2026 11:00:50 +0000

I hear the question from time to time what the advantages and disadvantages of Windows 3.0 were. Windows 3.0, released May 22, 1990, is generally considered the first usable version of Microsoft Windows. It was certainly the first one to

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