David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
On June 23, 1999, AMD announced its much anticipated Athlon CPU, the successor to its very successful K6. It launched less than two months later, on August 9, 1999. The Athlon proved to be the CPU that separated AMD from all of the other x86 CPU manufacturers who fell by the wayside. It was the first non-Intel x86 CPU that outperformed Intel’s fastest CPU at the time, a big change from years of playing catch-up to Intel.
I’m just going to put this out there. Jay Miner is my hero. He designed the Atari 2600 game console, the Atari 8-bit computers, and the Amiga computer. But he made contributions to humanity outside of that, working on medical devices when he wasn’t making the greatest computers of whatever decade he was working in. He did this in spite of not being able to invent something to save himself, and he died much too soon, aged 62, on June 20, 1994.
Windows Millenium Edition, or Windows Me or Windows ME, was released June 19, 2000. It was the successor to Windows 98 SE and Microsoft’s least successful operating system since the late 1980s. It was Microsoft’s last operating system based on MS-DOS.
June 1979 is a significant month in history for Microsoft for two reasons. That month, they crossed the threshold of an installed base of 200,000 on its flagship 8080 Basic. And on June 18, 1979, Microsoft released a version of Basic for a new CPU called the Intel 8086. They had no way of knowing how significant the 8086 product would become.
The Apple Disk II, first released in June 1978 about a year after the Apple II computer, is a great story of a genius inventor outsmarting The Man to deliver affordable disk-based storage to the masses, liberating them from the tyranny of slow and cumbersome linear cassette-based storage. It’s a great story. Some of it is even true.
On June 16, 1987, the GIF file format made its debut. That’s right, GIF predates the modern Internet. The first web browsers supported GIF because it was already very popular in the early 1990s and well supported.
On June 13, 1994, a mathematics professor discovered a bug in Intel’s then-new Pentium CPU. Intel’s new CPU was fast, but it couldn’t divide correctly. The bug became known as the Pentium FDIV bug. It resulted in Intel recalling 60 and 66 MHz Pentium CPUs in stepping levels prior to D1, and 75, 90, and 100 MHz Pentium CPUs in steppings prior to B5. The recall cost Intel $475 million and might have caused reputational damage if more viable competitors had been available at the time. Collectors prize a surviving Pentium CPU with the FDIV bug today.
On June 12, 1997, 3Com and US Robotics merged at a cost of $8.5 billion. At the time, it was the merger of the two biggest names in their respective fields, and it seemed poised to become a telecommunications giant. Instead, it ended up being the beginning of the end for one storied brand and the beginning of a sharp decline for the other. In this blog post, we will look at what went wrong. Read more
My first experience with a computer wasn’t with a desktop machine or a game console. It was with an orange handheld device called a Texas Instruments Speak and Spell. Many Gen Xers born in the early 70s can probably say the same thing. Texas Instruments announced Speak & Spell on June 11, 1978.
On June 10, 1977, Apple launched the Apple II, one of the first pre-built desktop computers. It went on to sell about 6 million units over the course of the next 17 years, making it the longest lived and most successful of the three micro computers that arrived on the market in 1977. Some people say June 5, 1977 was the Apple II’s introduction date, but June 5 was the Commodore PET. The Apple II was just a few days after.
In its original configuration, it sold for $1,295 with 4 KB of RAM, and it plugged into a household cassette tape recorder for storage. Apple did not sell monitors until 1983, so you could either acquire a composite monitor or a third-party RF modulator that allowed you to use it with a television.