David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
On August 19, 2010, CPU manufacturer Intel purchased antivirus maker McAfee. At the time, few people knew why. And let’s just say fewer people were surprised when Intel unacquired McAfee in April 2017 than they were when they made the acquisition.
It was 29 years ago this week that Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer. It was almost an afterthought, just one of the components in the Windows 95 Plus pack, along with additional themes and a 3D pinball game. But things change, to say the least.
When it comes to the question of how many IBM PCs were sold, the numbers I hear are all over the place. I’ve heard 3 million, 60 million, and several numbers in between. In this blog post, I’ll uncover the reason there are so many conflicting numbers.
But if I tell you IBM initially only expected to sell 1,000 units in its first six months after its August 12, 1981 release, you probably won’t believe me.
Thought lost for 39 years, Andy Warhol’s pioneering Amiga art resurfaced in July 2024. Andy Warhol’s birthday, August 6, is a great day to look back at his pioneering digital art and how it came to be lost and found again. Details of the reemergence help to shed light on an earlier discovery from about a decade ago. And those details come from the very person who taught Andy Warhol how to use a computer. In this blog post, I’ll put these discoveries in context, and offer some thoughts from both an art teacher and a sales engineer.
Colecovision was a game console released by toymaker Coleco in August 1982. In the context of its era, it was reasonably successful, selling about 2 million units before being discontinued in 1985. Colecovision’s main draw was a faithful port of the arcade hit Donkey Kong, which it licensed from Nintendo. Its original retail price was $175 and it measured 14 inches by 8 inches by 2 inches (35 cm by 20 cm by 5 cm). Adjusted for inflation, it cost $581 in 2025 dollars.
Colecovision sold well at first, selling 550,000 units in 1982 and another 500,000 units in the first quarter of 1983. Its catchphrase in its advertising was “we bring the arcade experience home.”
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.
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.
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.
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.