David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
Who did more than any other person in history to make computers affordable? My nomination goes to Sir Clive Sinclair, who was born on this day 85 years ago, July 30, 1940. And I’m an American who never used one of his computers.
Whenever I hear people complain about the save icon looking like a floppy disk and being anachronistic, I like to think about older anachronism. Bit bucket is a fun one. A modern bit bucket is a device that discards output, like /dev/null in Linux and Unix.
On June 29, 1993, IBM released the first energy star computer, the IBM PS/2 E. The “E” stood for energy. But while it was undeniably more efficient than other desktop PCs, arguably it was a PS/2 in name only. To make the PS/2 E more efficient, IBM used a mashup of technology, including but not limited to borrowing technology from its Thinkpad laptops. To celebrate its green nature, IBM adorned it with a big green stripe across the front. Yes, the stripe was green, not the traditional IBM blue.
Here’s a late ’80s memory you may not have thought about in a while. Do you remember going to the video rental store to rent a video game and getting the cartridge but not getting the instruction booklet? The reason video stores would rent you a cartridge without instructions dates back to events that started in late July 1989, when Nintendo sued Blockbuster.
Reddit calls itself the front page of the Internet. But for a good decade or even a decade and a half, Yahoo had as legitimate of a claim as any to the title of front page of the Internet. On July 25, 2016, Yahoo met an inglorious end as an independent company, selling out to Verizon for $4.8 billion. That makes today as good of a day as any to look at what happened to Yahoo, the first front page of the Internet.
On July 23, 1996, Novell sold the intellectual property of Digital Research to Linux vendor Caldera. The common thread the two companies had was Ray Noorda. Noorda had been CEO of Novell and was Novell’s largest shareholder, and Caldera was part of Noorda’s Canopy Group, where he incubated startups. The very next day, Caldera filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, accusing it of violating sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
On this day, 39 years ago, on July 23, 1985, Commodore introduced its Amiga 1000 computer. And let’s just say the world wasn’t ready for it yet. Dave Haynie, a Commodore engineer who worked on the later models, has said there was no such thing as a 1980s computer. There were 1970s computers and 1990s computers, and it was the Amiga that dragged the rest of the industry into the 1990s.
On November 4th, 1997, MCI and Worldcom merged in a deal worth $37 billion. This was an attempt by two large telecommunications companies to to combine and rival AT&T, but instead it turned into one of the biggest scandals and bankruptcies of its era. On July 21, 2002, the combined company went bankrupt, setting a record at the time as the largest bankruptcy in history.
Intel was founded July 18, 1968, by semiconductor pioneers Gordon Moore (of Moore’s law fame) and Robert Noyce and investor Arthur Rock. Intel’s employee #3 was Andrew Grove. Moore, Noyce, and Grove had all worked together at Fairchild Semiconductor in the mid 1960s.
The name “Intel” means INTegrated ELectronics. Moore and Noyce didn’t want to name the company after themselves, as it would sound like “more noise.” With noise being an undesired property in electronics, they initially chose the name NM Electronics, using their initials, but changed the name to Intel less than two weeks after its founding. Intel was already a trademark of a hotel chain, so the young company bought the rights to the name.
It’s world emoji day, which makes today the perfect day to look back at retro emojis from the 80s and 90s. It might surprise you to hear we had emojis that long ago. We’ve had them since 1982, to be precise. The first known use was on a bulletin board by Scott Fahlman, a Carnegie Mellon computer science professor, on September 19, 1982. They didn’t stop there. Whether we called them emojis, emoticons, smileys, or just faces, they proliferated throughout online life in the 80s and 90s.