David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
The Magnavox Odyssey 2 is an overlooked second generation game console, at least in the United States. I was curious how this console sold 2 million units and yet I never saw one and rarely heard about it growing up. It was launched December 1, 1978 and discontinued March 20, 1984. That makes today as good of a time as any to give this console a second look.
AOL, also known as America Online, wasn’t the first online service. But it became the biggest and most popular one. For many people of a certain age, AOL was their first experience with a modem, or with the Internet. Let’s take a look back at AOL history and how its legacy affects things even today.
AOL long had a reputation as a place where inexperienced, unsophisticated computer users hung out, but the company had a long streak of innovation and was ahead of its time in many regards. I’ll bet you had no idea the history of America Online begins way back in 1983. And you may also be surprised to hear the company still exists, though in a different form, even today.
On March 19, 1987, the Pentagon announced that it had learned the Soviet Union acquired machine tooling for making submarine propeller blades from Toshiba Machine, a subsidiary of Toshiba Corporation, better known as a major electronics manufacturer. Between the machine tools the Soviets acquired from Toshiba and Norwegian weapons maker Kongsberg, the Soviets were able to make their submarines harder to detect, identify, and track.
One of the results of scandal was the U.S. Government banning its own use of Toshiba computers and certain other products from Toshiba until the end of 1991. The Japanese government was unhappy with the ban, but did not intervene. This Cold War scandal is largely forgotten today but was a major incident at the time.
On March 16, 1982, sales of the eagerly anticipated Pac-Man conversion for the Atari 2600 started. The game was supposed to launch April 3, 1982. But some retailers started selling the game early. This wouldn’t happen today, but the 1980s were a different time. Atari didn’t have the power to stop it in March 1982, and although nobody realized it at the time, Atari was at the very pinnacle of its power in the early spring of 1982.
Pac-Man ended up being the best selling video game cartridge of 1982, but in the long run, the reputational damage Atari suffered wasn’t worth the cash it made from the 8 million copies it sold.
On March 13, 1986, Microsoft shook up the financial world, and to some degree, we are still feeling the reverberations from that 40 years later. That was the day of Microsoft’s very successful IPO. The hunt for the next Microsoft began immediately, leading directly to the dotcom bubble of the turn of the century. And arguably, the desire for Microsoft and the tech companies who emerged out of the dotcom bubble to prevent another Microsoft contributed to the AI bubble of the mid 2020s.
On March 12, 1989, computer programmer Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote a paper titled “Information Management, a proposal.” Working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, he had a problem with information about particle accelerators and experiments being stored on too many different computers with no convenient way to access the data from another computer and no good way to link data stored on one computer to data stored on another one. His proposed solution contained early but recognizable descriptions of HTTP, HTML, and the URI.
Tim Berners-Lee didn’t invent the Internet. Kind of like Al Gore. But he invented something. And his invention did make the Internet infinitely easier to use, and it had many uses beyond his initial need to share information about nuclear science.
The Amiga 600 was one of the last Amigas, and it became a symbol of everything wrong with Commodore and the product line. Retro enthusiasts like it today because of its small size, so it’s the perfect retro Amiga for today. But it couldn’t have been much more wrong for the time it was introduced, March 11-18, 1992 at the CeBit show.
The Amiga 600 was a cost-reduced Amiga for home use, similar in size and appearance to a Commodore 64. But internally it wasn’t much more than a repackaged Amiga 1000 from 1985, trying to compete with VGA graphics and 386 CPUs.
26 years ago, on March 10, 2000, the dotcom bubble reached its peak. The tech-heavy NASDAQ reached its peak that day at 5,048.62, before the bubble burst and stocks went tumbling. Pinpointing when the dotcom bubble burst and when the era ended are harder. But pinpointing when it reached its highest point is easy.
On March 8, 1983, IBM released the follow up to its very successful IBM PC. The new model was called the PC/XT and it carried the model number 5160. “XT” stood for “eXtended Technology.” It offered greater expandability than the original PC, but improvements in speed and memory capacity had to wait for the next model, the 5170 PC/AT.
On March 7, 1983, one of the greatest New Wave songs of all time was released. And it shipped in an unusual record sleeve shaped like a floppy disk, complete with cutouts so the record could show through like the floppy part of an 8- or 5.25-inch computer disk. The song was Blue Monday by New Order.