David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
Sun Microsystems was a high flying technology company for much of the 80s, 90s, and even early into the 21st century. But they fell fast and they fell hard. Although they were not a dotcom company, having had their IPO on March 4, 1986, the dotcom bust mortally wounded Sun. The result of that was on January 27, 2010, Oracle acquired Sun for $7.4 billion. And slowly but surely, Oracle is retiring parts of that Sun legacy.
For nearly two decades, Intel was a go-to brand not just for CPUs but also for motherboards. On January 20, 2013, Intel pulled out of the market, ending an era. Here’s why Intel stopped making motherboards.
Intel saw motherboard production as a way to protect its brand identity more than as a profit center. Once the industry had several other companies producing motherboards that met acceptable quality standards, Intel had little reason to stay. The key to understanding Intel’s motherboard business is understanding Intel’s mindset. Intel will introduce products just to sell or protect another product, then leave that market when the product no longer needs that support.
Transmeta may be most notable today for its $273 million IPO on Nov 7, 2000 being the last successful tech IPO until the Google IPO in 2004. But on January 19, 2000, Transmeta’s big news was its new Crusoe CPU.
In the late 90s and early 2000s, the gadget that said more than any other that you had arrived was the Blackberry, a little device from Research in Motion that let you read your e-mail and respond to it from anywhere. And then it became old-fashioned just as quickly as it burst onto the scene. What happened to Blackberry?
You might be surprised to hear the company is still around and that you can still buy Blackberry phones. But the device that made it famous, introduced January 19, 1999, isn’t retro enough to be cool again and isn’t its future. And it knows it.
We need to talk about the year 2038 problem. The year 2038 problem exists on Unix and Unix-like systems, and other software that borrowed the Unix time standard. The problem is that on January 19, 2038, the 32 bit integer that Unix uses to represent time is going to wrap around. And then the computer is going to think it is December 13, 1901. If this sounds a lot like the Y2K problem, you’re not wrong. The dates involved are different, but the effect is very similar.
When did VCRs get popular? It’s hard to give an exact date. I was alive in the 1980s, and it was a gradual thing. But I will argue that 1984 is as good of a starting point as any, because 1984 was the year VCRs became legal. Yes, part of the problem with VCR adoption was the question of whether they violated copyright law. But the Supreme Court settled that on January 17, 1984.
On January 16, 1996, AMD closed on its acquisition of NexGen. It was a transformational purchase for AMD, as it gave them a way ahead after AMD’s own design team struggled to create a viable competitor for Intel’s Pentium CPU. NexGen had been the first company to produce a Pentium-class CPU outside of Intel.
In my mind, the most overlooked contributor to the rise of the Internet as we know it today is the NCSA, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. The NCSA is a computing research partnership at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Research at the NCSA is the missing link between what Tim Berners-Lee was doing at CERN and Netscape, the early dotcom darling. NCSA opened January 15, 1986.
On January 11, 2021, Gamestop stock surged 50% out of the blue. Yes, Gamestop, the brick and mortar video game store that once had about 7,500 locations globally at its peak in 2016, but closes hundreds of locations every year. And 2021 was no exception, with about 400 closures that year. Its closures get it mentioned in the same breath as struggling retailers like Joann, Forever 21, and Macy’s. So why did its stock suddenly jump 50 percent some random day in a year that it closed 400 stores?