David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
26 years ago this week the Pentium III launched. It was noteworthy for being the CPU that broke the gigahertz barrier, but also for being a better chip than its successor. The Pentium 4 clocked higher, but a Pentium III at 1.13 GHz outperformed a Pentium 4 at 1.5 GHz. It wasn’t really until the Pentium 4 doubled the speed of the Pentium III that the P4 became a good CPU.
Legendary game designer Sid Meier was born February 24, 1954. After creating a run of popular flight simulators in the early and mid 1980s, he shifted to strategy games in the second half of the decade, creating some of the greatest strategy games of all time in the late 1980s and into the 1990s.
For about three decades, Fry’s Electronics was the go-to computer store for enthusiasts, almost an Ikea of computer stores. It was a big box store, larger than Comp USA, selling not just software and pre-built computers and peripherals, but also parts, and even discrete components. So what happened to Fry’s Electronics?
The chain peaked at 34 stores in nine states. So that means a significant part of the population never got to set foot in one. But it took on mythic status thanks to computer magazines and the Internet. Byte columnist Jerry Pournelle would write about computers he built cheaply from parts he bought at Fry’s at “prices so low, they might as well have been giving it to me.”
The history of Dell computers is a classic story of how a little guy took on a titan of business and ended up becoming a titan himself, the kind of story Americans love to tell. Like many computer industry stories, it started with humble beginnings.
Michael Dell wasn’t a total rags to riches story. He wasn’t a pauper. He was the son of an orthodontist and a stockbroker, and showed an entrepreneurial bent starting at age 9, when he made $2,000 selling collectible stamps. As a teenager, he earned $18,000 selling newspaper subscriptions to an untapped market he found himself. Crucially, by the age of 15, he was showing an interest in computers. His parents wanted him to become a doctor.
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.