David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
38 years ago this week, The Legend of Zelda was released in the United States. Today, people are divided on what kind of game it was, but in 1987, no one cared. It was the first time anyone had seen anything like it on a game console. And it was a sensation.
Microsoft QuickBasic was a commercially available programming language for MS-DOS, initially released August 18, 1985. Qbasic, the Basic interpreter included with MS-DOS versions 5 and 6, was a cut-down version of QuickBasic. Most notably, the bundled version lacked the ability to compile programs into standalone executable files. But otherwise, the two were compatible.
On August 19, 2010, CPU manufacturer Intel purchased antivirus maker McAfee. At the time, few people knew why. And let’s just say fewer people were surprised when Intel unacquired McAfee in April 2017 than they were when they made the acquisition.
Egghead Software was a US retail store that sold computer software from 1984 to 2001. It declared bankruptcy 24 years ago this week, on August 18, 2001, after an attempted transition to selling online failed.
August 17, 2000 was a major milestone for the Internet. You could argue it’s the day the Internet went mainstream, completing the transition from something computer science students used in college to something their parents would use to buy books and offbeat collectibles. It was the day Nielson announced that the Internet had reached half of US households.
It was 29 years ago this week that Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer. It was almost an afterthought, just one of the components in the Windows 95 Plus pack, along with additional themes and a 3D pinball game. But things change, to say the least.
It was 26 years ago this week, on Aug 11, 1999, that Red Hat, the Linux vendor, conducted its IPO. It was not the biggest IPO of 1999, and it wasn’t even the biggest Linux-related IPO of 1999. But Red Hat was one of the survivors of the dotcom era, exiting as a result of an acquisition more than 20 years later. Investors may have initially been divided on the company but in the end the naysayers were wrong.
When it comes to the question of how many IBM PCs were sold, the numbers I hear are all over the place. I’ve heard 3 million, 60 million, and several numbers in between. In this blog post, I’ll uncover the reason there are so many conflicting numbers.
But if I tell you IBM initially only expected to sell 1,000 units in its first six months after its August 12, 1981 release, you probably won’t believe me.
MP3 piracy was born August 10, 1996. That day, a pirate using the handle of Netfrack released a copy of Metallica’s Until it Sleeps for free download on IRC, an Internet protocol intended for chat, not file sharing.
The early star of the dot-com boom wasn’t Amazon or Ebay, it was Netscape, a company who produced a web browser of the same name. It went boom high and it went boom fast as it rose. And when it fell, it went boom hard and loud. Its IPO on August 9, 1995 launched the dot-com bubble. In this blog post, I’ll explain why it was pretty much doomed by the time it went public.