David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
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.
When I interviewed Jeff Bruette about Andy Warhol, of course I couldn’t resist asking him about other things about Commodore. Bruette wasn’t strictly an Amiga guy. He started at Commodore during its 8-bit era, including programming Commodore versions of hit arcade games like Gorf. So of course I asked him what he thought about Commodore founder and longtime CEO Jack Tramiel. To celebrate Jack Tramiel’s birthday, December 13, 1928, let’s retell his favorite Jack Tramiel story.
The Western Design Center 65c816 is an underdog CPU from the 1980s. It was never the best available CPU of its time and it was never the cheapest. It was a 16-bit CPU from a time of transition from 8 bits to 16 and 32 bits, released around the same time as the first fully 32-bit CPUs. But it’s an interesting CPU, even if it doesn’t get the attention other contemporary CPUs received. It was introduced the week of December 12, 1983.
19 years ago this week, on December 8, 2006, IBM sold its PC business to Lenovo, ending a 25-year run. IBM did retain its server business, but ultimately sold that to Lenovo as well at a later date. In this blog post, we explore why IBM left the PC business.