David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
Fifteen years ago, Twitter was still relevant. And nobody had ever tweeted from a Commodore VIC-20, the best selling computer of 1982, before. Syd Bolton, the curator of the Canadian Personal Computer Museum, decided to fix that. And on February 20, 2010, a VIC-20 tweeted.
The classic black comedy Office Space debuted in theaters February 19, 1999. It was Mike Judge’s first live-action film. Judge is better known for his animated series Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill, but I’ll argue Office Space shows Judge’s versatility, and for me, Office Space will always be his masterpiece.
Windows 2000 was released to the public February 17, 2000 to much anticipation. It wasn’t a consumer operating system, but businesses looked forward to a step forward from Windows NT 4.0 that would bring better reliability and ease of use.
On February 16, 1978, Ward Christensen and Randy Suess launched the first public dialup BBS, or bulletin board system, the predecessor of online discussion forums and web sites like Reddit and Digg.
YouTube’s founding date was February 15, 2005. Its founders were Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, three early employees of PayPal. It was their next project after Ebay purchased Paypal and left the three with a windfall. On October 9, 2006, YouTube was purchased by Google for $1.65 billion. The name is a reference to the cathode ray tube that was the main component in televisions until the early 2010s. A common nickname for TV during the CRT era was “The Tube.”
YouTube was not the first video-sharing site on the Internet. Vimeo launched in November 2004, though that site remained a side project of its developers from CollegeHumor so it never attained Youtube’s success.
Prodigy was a 1980s online service that later morphed into an Internet service provider. It survived into the early 2000s but faded as its business model disappeared. Here’s what happened to Prodigy Internet.
Google’s first acquisition was a company called Deja News. It was a small acquisition compared to things that were to come, but it was a synergistic and strategic acquisition at the time. Google acquired Deja News on Feb. 13, 2001.
On February 14, 2006, Sony announced its final CRT television, the KD-34XBR970. The last Sony CRT TV was a 34-inch model, with high definition and a 16:9 screen. So it wasn’t what we typically think of when it comes to CRTs. Or maybe we should say televisions. Plural. Because at the same time, Sony also released three conventional 4:3 standard definition models: the 36-inch KD-36FS170, 32-inch KV-32FS170 and 27-inch KV27FS170.
Pets.com was a pioneering Internet startup selling pet food. Amazon even owned a significant stake in the company. So why did it stop taking orders in November 9, 2000, become the butt of a Superbowl ad joke the next year, and you see chewy.com packages all over your neighborhood instead?
Buy.com was founded in 1997 by Scott Blum. It was an e-commerce site whose gimmick was taking the concept of a loss leader to an extreme, trying to subsidize the low prices by selling advertising. In 2010, it was purchased by Japanese company Rakuten, rebranded as Rakuten.com, and ultimately shut down in 2020, ending a 23-year run.