David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
The Tandy 2000 was aptly named. It was twice as good as the Tandy 1000 in nearly every way. But it wasn’t even half as successful. In this blog post, I will explain how the Tandy 2000’s commercial failure and its reliance on Microsoft Windows set the tone for subsequent Tandy computers and perhaps even doomed the whole product line.
The Tandy 1000 wasn’t Tandy’s first foray into the IBM PC compatible market. That was the Tandy 2000, released in November 1983. But in late 1983, Tandy started preparing the Tandy 1000, a home and education-oriented PC aimed at the lower end of the market, to compete with the IBM PCjr. First released in mid November 1984, it became a bestseller and spawned three generations of Tandy 1000 models, surviving on the market until 1992.
It was 62 years ago, on November 18, 1963, that the push button telephone, or touch tone phone, was first introduced.
Syquest was a maker of removable hard drives. It was a clever idea that is completely obsolete in these days of high capacity USB flash drives, but at the time, Syquest drives solved a real problem. Founded January 27, 1982, they were a pioneer of removable hard drives for personal computers.
Ira Lewis Velinsky was the industrial designer for Commodore and later Atari in the 1980s. He was responsible for the curvy “Porsche PET” cases, as well as the case design of the short-lived Commodore TED machines, and later, the Atari ST. Sadly, Ira Velinsky died November 14, 2000 of a heart attack while returning home from Comdex in Las Vegas. He was only 46.
Occasionally you see a YouTube video or a vintage computer post about a computer branded AOpen, sometimes with an additional badge on it. It’s also easy to find individual components branded AOpen, including optical drives, motherboards, power supplies, and pretty much everything but floppy drives. In case you were wondering, it is all related.
3Com was a high flying maker of network cards and other network equipment. And then they disappeared with a whimper on November 11, 2009. What happened to 3Com?
It was November 10th, 1983 that Microsoft first announced Microsoft Windows, a graphical environment for IBM PC and compatible computers. It arrived late and without all of the promised features, so it was very much like future Windows versions like Windows Vista and Windows 8 in that regard.
Transmeta was the last big IPO of the dotcom era, launching Nov 7, 2000. Some analysts call its $273 million IPO the last successful tech IPO until the Google IPO in 2004. Transmeta didn’t completely fit in to the dotcom era, because they were a hardware company. But they were still a technology company, and if their plans had gone well, they would have sold their product to dotcoms, but it didn’t work out that way for them. In this blog post we explore what happened to Transmeta.
Micron Computers was a moderately successful attempt by Micron Technology, a maker of computer memory chips, to market PCs. First released in 1995, the venture succeeded very well at first, and survived in the marketplace until November 6, 2008. Although not widely remembered today, Micron made dependable, reliable PCs at a fair price.