David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
Readers of a certain age will remember CompUSA, a defunct big-box computer retailer. What happened to CompUSA? It went out of business, then came back as an undead brand, then went away again.
In some ways, CompUSA was the epitome of 1990s computer retail. It had huge big box stores with aisles of software and upgrades. It sold desktop computers, including its own house brand, Compudyne, manufactured for CompUSA by Acer. But the business model didn’t work as well in the 21st century.
On February 22, 1987, American pop artist Andy Warhol died at the age of 58 in New York City of irregular heartbeat following gallbladder surgery.
Game designer Danielle Bunten Berry was born February 19, 1949. Her best game was called M.U.L.E., a multiplayer turn-based strategy game in a sci-fi setting originally developed on the Atari 800 and then ported to other systems like the Commodore 64, MSX 2, IBM PC, and, eventually, the Nintendo NES. It was one of Electronic Arts‘ debut five titles.
What’s better, biometrics like a fingerprint or face recognition, a pass key, or old fashioned passwords? A couple of different conversations I had recently spurred this question, and I think it’s worth exploring.
It was 15 years ago today, on February 10, 2010, that Google announced Google Fiber. This was the first truly high speed Internet service in a modern sense in the United States.
Lotus 1-2-3 was the killer app that made the IBM PC the standard for computers. It wasn’t the first spreadsheet, making its debut January 26, 1983, but it ran on a computer that could easily address more than 64K of memory, it was fast, and relatively bug free. So it was super successful. Today we know it as the thing people used before Excel. So what were the advantages and disadvantages of Lotus 1-2-3?
The title dates itself. On January 23, 1993, more people would have caught the reference. January 23, 1993 was the day the first cross-platform Web browser emerged from the NCSA, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, a computing research partnership at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, in the middle of the cornfields of Illinois.
On January 19, 1993, IBM announced a stunning $5 billion loss for fiscal year 1992, earning the unfortunate nickname of “Big Black and Blue” until its turnaround later in the decade.
It was 41 years ago this month, in January 1984, that RUN magazine made its debut. With RUN, Wayne Green applied the formula he used for 80 Micro to the hot-selling Commodore 8-bit home computers. While it was no longer an original idea, RUN arguably was even more successful than 80 Micro had been.
The VIA Cyrix III was a short-lived Socket 370 CPU produced by VIA using technology it acquired from Cyrix and Centaur, two makers of Socket 7 CPUs. VIA first introduced the Cyrix III on January 5, 2001.