David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
40 years ago today, on April 9, 1986, Osborne Computer Corporation, one of the early makers of CP/M computers and a pioneer in portable computing, liquidated after three years of financial hardship. Its demise is generally blamed on its founder, Adam Osborne, saying too much about an upcoming computer. But that oversimplifies a longer and more complex story.
It is hard for me to be objective about the Atari ST, because I was a dyed in the wool Amiga fanboy in the early ’90s. But the Atari ST was released April 8, 1985 and quickly sold 50,000 units. For a while, it looked like the future belonged to the Motorola 68000-based computers and the ST was going to be a big part of that.
Then again, since you probably are not reading this on an Atari ST, there is an argument that the ST was a failure. So it could be that I am grading on a curve. I expected the machine to be a nothing burger, and it ended up selling 2.1 million units at a time when 2.1 million units shipped still was a pretty impressive number.
A lot of software advertises itself as working with a Hayes modem or Hayes compatible modem. What does that mean? And what’s Hayes? It’s a de facto standard named after a defunct maker of modems. Let’s talk about why Hayes was important. It was so important, you can even still buy a USB Hayes compatible modem for legacy applications today.
Hayes introduced a command set that started with the letters AT, for ATtention. Other makers adopted this command set and cloned the Hayes modem to various degrees, leading to the terminology of a Hayes compatible modem.
Released April 6, 1992, Windows 3.1 was the successor to the very successful Windows 3.0. It wasn’t great, just like Windows 3.0 wasn’t great. But it was a graphical user interface that ran on very inexpensive ordinary PCs, and enough people considered it good enough that it more or less ensured the future belonged to Windows.
AMD launched its K6 microprocessor on April 2, 1997. It was a competitor for Intel’s Pentium II CPU, but unlike the Pentium II, it plugged into the previous-generation Pentium socket. Being less expensive than a Pentium II and using less expensive motherboards, the AMD K6 allowed for much less expensive PCs. The K6 competed successfully with Intel.
The K6 cost between $244 and $469 at launch time. That undercut Intel by about 35%.
On April 23, 1987, Thomas Rattigan drove to work just as he would any other day. But when he arrived at Commodore’s office building in suburban Philadelphia that morning, company guards informed him he’d been fired. They escorted him from the premises, not even giving him a chance to gather his family photos from his desk. It sounded like a cruel April Fool’s joke, but it wasn’t April Fool’s Day. That was the day Commodore promoted him, on April Fool’s Day 1986.
Rattigan ended up having the last laugh, although it took a few years.
On April 1, 1963, Charles Tandy booked one of the junior ballrooms at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston and put out a call to Radio Shack employees to meet there that evening. There were rumors of changes afloat, but no one knew anything specific. That night, about 40 employees assembled in the ballroom where Tandy and C.O. Buckalew, one of his accountants, were waiting for them. “I’m Charles Tandy from Fort Worth, Texas,” he said to the group. “I now own Radio Shack.”
April 1, 1999 was no April Fool’s joke for Mark Cuban. On that day, he sold his company, broadcast.com, to Yahoo for $5.7 billion and became a billionaire. The deal doesn’t make a lot of sense today, but at the time, it was possible to see what Yahoo was thinking. Meanwhile, Mark Cuban did fine for himself, buying sports teams and starring on TV’s Shark Tank.
Quantum was one of several hard drive manufacturers who thrived in the shadow of Seagate and Western Digital in the late 1980s and through the 1990s. On March 31, 2001, Quantum merged with Maxtor, another smaller, independent drive manufacturer. The $1.3 billion acquisition made Maxtor larger than Seagate, however briefly. But the expected $6 billion in annual revenue for the combined company never panned out.
I made no secret about my high regard for Quantum hard drives back when they were new. But Quantum hard drives are notorious in the retro community today. I think I can explain what’s going on.
Procomm Plus was the ultimate terminal emulator of the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was a product of Datastorm, a small software company based in Columbia, Mo., a college town about halfway between St. Louis and Kansas City. Obsolete for years because of the decline of BBSs and big iron computing, it still has a niche following among hobbyists who like vintage minicomputers and mainframes, because it can emulate almost any terminal you might want.
It was 30 years ago, on March 28, 1996, that Datastorm ended its run as an independent software publisher.