David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
On January 2, 1975, Microsoft announced Altair Basic, their first product. It was a programming language for the MITS Altair 8800 computer, a product that let people write their own software for the new computer. The makers of the computer licensed Altair Basic on July 22, 1975, and sold $16,005 worth of product by the end of the year.
Al Alcorn was a New Year’s baby, born January 1, 1948. He was Atari’s first full-time engineer and an early casualty of Ray Kassar‘s management style after the Sock King took over as Atari CEO.
Arguably, Alcorn is famous for two things. He was the engineer who designed Pong, and he was also the engineer who hired a young Steve Jobs.
Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was a minor-ish revision of Windows 3.1 released December 31, 1993. Windows 95 was still 20 months away and IBM was threatening to make a dent in the 32-bit OS market with OS/2, so Microsoft backported some of the Windows 95 code to Windows 3.1 to make it more 32-bit as a stopgap measure.
But the user experience overall was much more like Windows 3.1 than Windows 95. The enhancements were mostly under the hood.
At the end of the year in 2008, one of the most legendary motherboard manufacturers of all time sadly went out of business. I am talking about Abit. What happened to Abit motherboards? A combination of factors took it down, including declining quality, loss of a key engineer, and a good old-fashioned scandal.
The Register published an article called Christmas 1984: the last hurrah for 8 bit home computers. The consensus on social media was it wasn’t the last hurrah and I agree with that. But something did change after 1984. Let’s explore why I think it’s better to call 1984 the last perfect year for 8-bit home computers.
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.