David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
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.
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.