David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
30 years ago today, on May 26, 1995, Bill Gates wrote a company memo to Microsoft. It was something he did every few years, outlining the company’s top priority. But this one was different. It was a five-alarm fire titled “The Internet Tidal Wave,” warning that the Internet was going to change everything and had the potential to disrupt the current order, displacing Microsoft and other titans of the computer industry.
I used AOL before it was AOL. And if you had a Commodore and a modem in the 1980s, you may have too. On May 24, 1985, Control Video reorganized and became Quantumlink, or Q-Link for short, on its way to reinventing itself as an online service for home computers. It opened for business November 5 of the same year.
I hear the question from time to time what the advantages and disadvantages of Windows 3.0 were. Windows 3.0, released May 22, 1990, is generally considered the first usable version of Microsoft Windows. It was certainly the first one to see commercial success. The oft-repeated advice to always wait for Microsoft’s version 3 is a direct reference to Windows 3.0 that still gets repeated today.
Although Windows 3.0 is clumsy by today’s standards, in 1990 it had the right combination of everything to take the world by storm.
Before Microsoft was obsessed with Netscape, it was obsessed with another piece of software: Quicken. Unable to beat it in the marketplace with a clone called Microsoft Money, Microsoft tried to buy its publisher, Intuit, outright. On May 20, 1995, Microsoft and Intuit abandoned that merger over antitrust concerns.
On May 18, 1998, the Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft, seeking ultimately to break up the company. The case was controversial at the time and remains controversial now, but I would also argue the case is misunderstood today, and the Microsoft of today is not the Microsoft of the 1990s, and the Microsoft Antitrust Case of 1998 had something to do with that.
It’s popular to say today that the Microsoft antitrust case of 1998 was unnecessary and the market figured out how to handle Microsoft. But provisions in the settlement kept Microsoft from behaving toward Google the way they behaved toward Netscape and Lotus.
The dotcom bubble was full of absurdities. A common business model was giving away software or services and finding unconventional ways to make money off it, a model we today call “freemium” and that may or may not involve spyware. Geocities with its free web hosting was a good example. But Cyberrebate.com took it to an extra special level of absurdity. It gave away actual physical merchandise and had a scheme to make it profitable. Cyberrebate made its debut May 16, 1998, and closed its doors exactly 3 years later, on May 16, 2001.
On May 14, 1992, Texas Instruments licensed Cyrix‘s 486SLC and 486DLC technologies. The agreement allowed Cyrix to use Texas Instruments’ manufacturing facilities, and for TI to create derivative chips from Cyrix’s technology. TI didn’t end up making as many chips for Cyrix as SGS-Thomson or IBM did, but TI did end up making interesting derivatives of Cyrix’s CPUs, including the 486SXL-40, the fastest 386-class CPU ever made.
Processor Technology Corporation was a personal computer company founded in April 1975, by Gary Ingram and Bob Marsh in Berkeley, California. Their first product was a 4K byte RAM board that was compatible with the MITS Altair 8800 computer but more reliable than the MITS board. They followed it up with a series of memory and I/O boards including a video display module.
Kevin O’Leary, also known as Mr. Wonderful, is one of the most divisive stars of the reality TV series Shark Tank. Like Mark Cuban, O’Leary made much of his fortune in technology. But while Cuban is a dotcom billionaire, O’Leary made his money through a different model, selling software at retail. In this blog post, we will map out how Mr. Wonderful became rich. May 13 is a happy anniversary for him, but I can think of a major toymaker who doesn’t call him Mr. Wonderful.
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On May 12, 2017, ransomware named Wannacry started spreading across the globe, infecting and encrypting Windows systems by exploiting CVE-2017-0144, a flaw that a two-month-old Microsoft patch, MS17-010, had fixed.
It quickly became one of the biggest Windows outbreaks ever. Why was it so bad, and what could have made it go better?