David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
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.
The Coleco Adam computer was a 1983 attempt by toy and game console maker Coleco to enter the growing home computer market. Critics and consumers looked forward to the computer after Coleco unveiled it June 5, 1983, but it never lived up to that anticipation. Coleco discontinued the Adam in 1985. Nevertheless, the Adam remains an interesting might-have-been.
Electronic Arts was founded May 28th, 1982. It was founded to be a different kind of software company, a reaction to what was happening at the time in the software industry.
It was on April 30, 2012 that Chrome passed Internet Explorer in market share for the first time. It took nearly 14 years for someone to pass the former afterthought in the Microsoft Plus pack to become the dominant browser. The two browsers jockeyed for the lead for two weeks, with Chrome overcoming IE for good on May 14, 2012.
With Chrome taking over, we traded one monopolist, Microsoft, for another, Google.
Windows 10 is going end of life in mid October, less than six months from now. It’s not supported on PCs with less than an 8th-generation Core i series processor, which leaves a huge number of systems that run Windows 10 more or less fine out in the cold. But there is a way around that. I’ve been running Windows 11 on unsupported hardware for a few months. And believe it or not, I almost like it better than Windows 10.
There’s no guarantee this will work forever. Microsoft may release future updates that require features present in newer CPUs. But this buys us some time beyond October 2025, at the very least.
Some dotcom-era startups were just bad ideas, and others were bad timing. I think Webvan was in the bad timing category. Today there is nothing especially odd about the idea of ordering groceries over the Internet. Several successful companies use some kind of variant of that business model today with success. On April 26, 2001, Webvan had an especially bad day. It pulled out of the Atlanta market, laid off 885 employees, and planned a 1-for-25 reverse stock split in a desperate attempt to keep its stock listed. This was just 13 days after its CEO, George Shaheen, resigned, on April 13, 2001.