The Silicon Underground

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.

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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.

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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.

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One of the more curious dotcom era startups was VA Linux. In a way, it makes sense, because so much of the dotcom boom was powered by Linux, so we’d expect a Linux company to do well in those times. But VA Linux operated on a business model that doesn’t really exist anymore. Its December 9, 1999 IPO set a record for its time.

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Atari’s biggest year was 1982, when it earned $320 million on $2 billion in sales. But it ended on a very sour note. On December 8, 1982, its parent company, Warner Bros, announced it expected a dramatic slump in fourth quarter per-share earnings largely because of disappointing sales of Atari’s video game cartridges. The news of Atari’s earning miss sent Warner’s stock price reeling, losing $16.75 per share the day after the announcement.

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On December 6, 2002, IBM departed the hard drive business with a whimper. IBM Deskstar drives were among the best drives in the industry. Licensing Deskstar technology from IBM in 1999 saved Western Digital. But we don’t call IBM hard drives Deskstars anymore. We call them death stars. It was all because of one misstep IBM made right around the turn of the century.

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The Apple IIGS, released September 15, 1986 and discontinued December 4, 1992, was the last computer in the Apple II line. It’s machine that retro computer enthusiasts love to argue about. That’s appropriate, because the critics disagreed about the machine even when it was new.

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You may have heard rumors of a Playstation audiophile CD player. That’s a bit of an exaggeration. But early models of the Sony Playstation do happen to be a much-better-than-average CD player. And to some extent, that propped up the value of original Playstations before this 30-year-old console, released in Japan December 3, 1994 and in North America on September 9, 1995, became collectible again.

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