David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
Al Gore didn’t invent the Internet, although that was a running joke for a decade or more. But in January 1994, my parents didn’t know what the Internet was. Most other people didn’t at that point either. Al Gore helped bring it into the public consciousness by using the phrase Information Superhighway in a keynote he delivered January 11, 1994.
On January 10, 2000, AOL dropped a bomb on the Internet, announcing its intention to acquire Time Warner, an old-line media giant, for $162 billion. It was a radical transformation for the company. But the synergies it sought never came to fruition.
AST Research was a high-flying brand in the early 1990s, but faded in the second half, making it a somewhat obscure 1990s computer brand. AST computers had a good following in the first half of the decade and they were generally high quality. Samsung’s April 1997 acquisition of AST gave the brand hope, but financial problems sunk the venture in 1999 and an effort to revive the brand failed in 2001.
AST Research shifted from making add-on cards in the 1980s to making entire PCs in the 1990s, but as PCs shifted to commodity parts under price pressure, AST failed to adapt. This led to a rapid decline in market share and the once-popular mass market PC brand disappeared from store shelves.
January 8, 1987 was a good day for the Commodore Amiga. It was the day the Amiga came into its own, when Commodore introduced the Amiga 500 and Amiga 2000 models at CES.
At the Consumer Electronics Show on January 7, 1984, a mysterious startup called Amiga showed signs of emerging from stealth mode. At the time, Amiga was known as a producer of controllers and games for Atari game consoles and 8-bit computers. But it was a front. Their long-term plan was a revolutionary new computer that it first demonstrated at that January show.
Commodore introduced its final 8 bit computer, the Commodore 128, on January 5, 1985 at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show (CES). It was an unusual and and often misunderstood machine. I have never seen another product subject to so much armchair quarterback. On its birthday, let’s take a look at what this computer was and why it was built the way it was.
It was January 1995. Microsoft was riding high. Windows 3.1 had sold well. The interim replacement, Windows 3.11, was selling well. The industry was abuzz for the upcoming Windows 95, expected sometime later in the year. Microsoft was in a golden era, a time when nothing could go wrong for them. And then they released Microsoft Bob. They should have named it Microsoft Bomb, because it bombed. But if you take one letter out of Bomb, you get Bob. So they almost got it right.
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.