David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
In July 1983, one of my personal favorite Commodore computer magazines of all time, Compute!’s Gazette, was born. An offshoot of the general computer magazine Compute!, Gazette’s first issue was dated July 1983 and quickly proved successful, closely following the trajectory of the Commodore 8-bit computers it covered.
On July 2, 1984, Atari got a new owner. After a disastrous 1983, its owner, Warner Communications, wanted out, just a year and a half after Atari had $2 billion in sales. It went from being called the greatest acquisition in history in the New York Times to a toxic asset in about 18 months. Warner found a buyer in Jack Tramiel, the exiled founder of Commodore.
The earliest dated article still active on Tom’s Hardware Guide is dated July 1, 1996. It was an article about CPU softmenus, something we pretty much take for granted today, but at the time was only available on select Abit and QDI motherboards. I’m not 100% certain that Tom’s Hardware Guide made its debut on July 1, 1996. In fact, I’m pretty sure it didn’t. But without a firm birth date, today’s as good of a day as any to look back at the very early days of a venerable PC hardware website.
You hear a lot about Sinclair and Amstrad and Acorn computers. But when it comes to British brands, it seems like we don’t hear a lot about Apricot. But thanks to a television program that aired in early 1990, we know a fair bit about Apricot’s triumphs and struggles in the highly competitive PC market of the 1980s and 90s. It was on June 30, 1999 that Apricot closed its factory in Scotland and wound down its brand.
Quick: Who was the first browser manufacturer to hold an IPO in the dotcom era? Netscape? WRONG! Its competitor Spyglass beat it out, holding its IPO June 27, 1995. Its IPO did rather well too, issuing two million shares at a cost of $17 per share and raising $28.5 million. A week later, it was trading for $28.25 per share.
The same week Spyglass went public, Netscape filed plans with the SEC for its own IPO.
In the wake of the dotcom bubble bursting, the record-setting startup VA Linux made a difficult decision. On June 26, 2001, it exited the hardware business. It was a curious decision but probably the right decision, because it survived nearly 14 more years as an independent company before being acquired by Gamestop.
It was late and it was overhyped. But it was better than Windows 95. On June 25, 1998, Microsoft shipped Windows 98, and while it didn’t get the fanfare Windows 95 did, it was better than Windows 95. And if you want a retro PC box today, you’re usually better off running Windows 98 or, better yet, 98SE on it than Windows 95.
3DO sounded like a great premise. Several great minds came together to design a game console that they could license to any consumer electronics manufacturer who wanted to make it. It could have been the VHS or the IBM PC clone of the video game console market. But it didn’t catch on and 3DO exited the game console market June 24, 1997.
On June 23, 1999, AMD announced its much anticipated Athlon CPU, the successor to its very successful K6. It launched less than two months later, on August 9, 1999. The Athlon proved to be the CPU that separated AMD from all of the other x86 CPU manufacturers who fell by the wayside. It was the first non-Intel x86 CPU that outperformed Intel’s fastest CPU at the time.
I’m just going to put this out there. Jay Miner is my hero. He designed the Atari 2600 game console, the Atari 8-bit computers, and the Amiga computer. But he made contributions to humanity outside of that, working on medical devices when he wasn’t making the greatest computers of whatever decade he was working in. He did this in spite of not being able to invent something to save himself, and he died much too soon, aged 62, on June 20, 1994.