David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
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.
The first Compaq computer was its eponymous Compaq Portable, announced November 4, 1982. It was a suitcase-sized clone of the original IBM Personal Computer, with an Intel 8088 CPU running at 4.77 MHz running Microsoft MS-DOS. It was hardly the first non-IBM computer to run MS-DOS, but it was the first legal IBM PC clone with a high degree of compatibility.
Compaq shipped the first unit about four months later, in March 1983. It originally cost $2995 for a single-drive unit. A dual-drive unit, which was much more useful, cost $3,590.
Monorail was a short-lived PC vendor from the late 1990s and early 2000s. Founded November 2, 1995, they were the first company to sell a Pentium-class PC including a display for under $1,000. And Monorail PCs were the first desktop all-in-one computer that included an LCD rather than using a CRT. On top of all that, they assembled their computers in the USA, utilizing a facility in Kansas City, Mo. So what happened to Monorail? Why did it fail?
So it’s November 1997. The Internet is catching on and you want to start an online business. You just need a big idea. How about selling toys on the Internet? That could be big, right? Hence etoys.com, a short-lived Internet retailer founded November 3, 1997.
That’s a bit of an exaggeration. While etoys was founded in November, the idea dated back to February 1997. That’s when former Walt Disney VP Toby Lenk joined up with Bill Gross, founder of a net startup incubator called Idealab, to start building etoys. They secured financing by September and launched in November, just in time for the 1997 holiday season.