The Silicon Underground

Gary Kildall’s death investigation, or the seeming lack thereof, has taken on mythical proportions. Gary Kildall’s story seems to have that effect on people. Just like the story of Kildall allegedly going flying instead of meeting with IBM, the story of Gary Kildall’s death on July 11, 1994 spiraled out of control.

While Gary Kildall died under unclear circumstances, his death was less unusual than early accounts made it seem. That’s why the investigation seemed to fizzle out with less fanfare than it deserved.

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Raymond Edward Kassar was born January 2, 1928 and died December 10, 2017, aged 89, in Vero Beach, Florida. Ray Kassar was president, and later CEO, of Atari Inc. from 1978 to 1983. Atari’s parent company, Warner Bros, hired him as president of Atari’s consumer division in February 1978 after he spent 26 years at Burlington Industries, a textile maker.

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30 years ago this week, on July 6, 1995, IBM bought Lotus Development for $3.5 billion. Lotus had once been the second largest software publisher in the world and was worth $5.5 billion at its IPO. Lotus wasn’t trending in the right direction, but IBM had plans and thought Lotus fit into them.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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