David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
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.
The K5 is AMD’s first x86 processor to be developed entirely in-house. Introduced March 27, 1996, its primary competition was Intel’s Pentium microprocessor. The K5 was an ambitious design, closer to a Pentium Pro internally than a Pentium. However, the final product was closer to the Pentium regarding performance, although faster clock-for-clock compared to the Pentium. The “K” in the name K5 stood for Kryptonite. AMD, being an underdog compared to Intel, hoped the K5 be the undoing for the Superman-like Intel.
The Melissa virus was a mass-mailing macro virus from March 1999. It was one of the more notorious computer viruses of the 1990s, and reportedly the author named it for a dancer he met in a Florida nightclub. Authorities quickly identified the author, David Lee Smith, and arrested him in New Jersey on April 1, 1999. He served two and a half years in prison and paid $7,500 in fines for creating the virus.
Steven Anthony Ballmer, born March 24, 1956, served as chief executive officer of Microsoft from 2000 to 2014. Today he is the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers of the National Basketball Association (NBA). Steve Ballmer’s personal wealth is around $145 billion, making him the tenth-richest person in the world. Together with Gates, their personalities defined Microsoft’s public image for about 30 years.
It’s a meme from the turn of the century, an irony to end all ironies. The cheapest computers on the market at the time, which were arguably obsolete the day before you bought them, had stickers on the front bragging they were never obsolete. Of course I’m talking about the eMachines Never Obsolete marketing campaign. Emachines was for a time a very popular line of inexpensive PCs, and the company held its initial public offering March 23, 2000, after selling 2 million PCs in 1999.
Now, what eMachines said and what they meant by never obsolete were two very different things, but if anything that just made the stickers more ludicrous.