David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
On December 26, 1982, Time magazine selected the computer as its person (or in this case, Machine) of the Year. It was the first time since its 1927 inception that Time‘s editors selected a non-human recipient for the award. The planet Earth was the second, in 1988. Prior to 1999, Time called it Man of the Year.
Late December 1990 was a pivotal time, although none of us realized it for a few years. Tim Berners-Lee, A British computer scientist working in Switzerland, was working on what became the World Wide Web. Over the course of a few months, he invented HTML, the web browser, and the web server, to make it easier to share information. Sometime in late December, the first web server reached a usable state. By some accounts it was December 20, 1990. By at least one account I found, it was December 25.
It was 25 years ago, December 22, 2000, that Egghead’s website, egghead.com, was hacked, exposing 3 and 1/2 million credit card numbers. This incident raised a question we’ve been asking ever since. How do we know that our payment information is safe?
On December 21, 2005, Seagate announced a $1.8 billion agreement to acquire rival Maxtor. The deal closed May 22, 2006. Seagate then proceeded to RIF 6,000 former Maxtor employees, half the former company’s workforce.
Move over, GE Widescreen 1000. In 1989 in Japan, Sony introduced to the largest Trinitron CRT ever built, the KV-45ED1, also known as the PVM-4300. And in 1990, they imported 20 of them to the United States, just in time for the recession. About 34 years later, one of these enigmatic TVs surfaced.
The dotcom boom was an era of excesses. And there is no greater example of the dotcom excess than what happened to a company called Internet America on December 21, 1999.
On December 19, 1974, MITS started selling kits for its computer, the Altair 8800. It was the first commercially successful personal computer, driven partially by its appearance on the cover of Popular Electronics magazine’s January 1975 issue. The kit cost $439, equivalent to $2885 in 2025 dollars.
On December 17, 1997, Michael Robertson and Greg Flores launched mp3.com. Flores had noticed that MP3 was a popular search term, so he and Robertson purchased the domain from the owner and went into business.
It’s hard to be an underdog operating system when you’re produced by a Fortune 10 company. But somehow, OS/2, IBM’s heir apparent to MS-DOS and PC DOS, managed to be exactly that. It’s the operating system everyone who was around in the 90s heard of, but few understood. And it has a reputation for being something nobody used. So it surprises people sometimes that IBM ended sales of OS/2 in December 2005. Most people assume it was much earlier.
On October 15, 2002, 3dfx went out of business. It was really a technicality, however. 3dfx hadn’t been a viable company for about 2 years, having sold the majority of its intellectual property to rival Nvidia on December 15, 2000 after its creditors forced it into bankruptcy. In this blog post, we’ll explore what happened to 3dfx and why 3dfx failed.