David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
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.
The integrated circuit, or computer chip, reached a major milestone 66 years ago this week, when Jack Kilby, an engineer at Texas Instruments, filed a patent for “miniaturized electronic circuits,” a multi-transistor device on Feb. 6, 1959.
Conner Peripherals was founded June 17, 1985 by Seagate Technology co-founder Finis Conner, in San Jose. On Sep. 20, 1995, Conner agreed to merge with Seagate in a deal worth $1 billion. The deal closed February 5, 1996. At the time of the merger, Conner was the second largest hard drive manufacturer, behind Seagate.
On February 5, 2015, Radio Shack filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy after posting losses 11 quarters in a row and accumulating $1.4 billion in debt. While not officially the end of Radio Shack, the Radio Shack that still exists today is a shadow of its pre-2015 self. At one time, Radio Shack was a retail giant, with about as many stores as McDonald’s, with a high percentage of them in small towns. A small town was about as likely to have a Radio Shack as a McDonald’s, and might not have both.
The most popular software product for the MITS Altair 8800 computer was Altair Basic, the first Microsoft product. But there was a problem. Only about 10 percent of Altair owners paid for Altair Basic. On February 3, 1976, Bill Gates decided to do something about it. He wrote a letter titled An Open Letter to Hobbyists in which, among other things, he said he made around $2 an hour writing Altair Basic.
The Intel 80286 (also marketed as the iAPX 286 and often called Intel 286) is a 16-bit microprocessor that was introduced on February 1, 1982 after about three years in development. It was the first 8086-based CPU with separate, non-multiplexed address and data buses and also the first with memory management and wide protection abilities. The 80286 used approximately 134,000 transistors and was nearly 100% backward compatible with the earlier Intel 8086 and 8088 processors.
What happened to Packard Bell computers? The firm ceased operations in the United States in 2000. Its former rival, Acer, acquired the brand January 31, 2008 for $46 million. It was a once-unimaginable outcome for what had been the top-selling computer brand in the United States.
But there’s more to the story than that. The Packard Bell story is a brilliant piece of marketing. The computers were terrible, but the marketing was as good as it gets. And that’s one of the reasons people remember it as one of the more prominent of the 90s computer brands, even if many who remember it don’t remember it fondly.
Twenty-one years ago, on January 30, 2004, Gateway announced it would be merging with eMachines. This brought two 90s computer brands together, but the tie-up didn’t go all that well. Let’s dig in and see what Gateway was thinking, and why it didn’t work. Because, let’s face it, who wouldn’t have wanted a never obsolete PC in a cow-spotted box?
JT Storage, aka JTS Corporation, looks on the surface like just another 90s hard drive company that got mauled by Seagate and Western Digital. But I’d say they were significant for two reasons: Their quality, and their corporate ancestry. You see, when Atari decided to close up shop in the 90s, it did so by merging with JTS.
The “JT” in JTS had nothing to do with Atari CEO Jack Tramiel, but the two companies were kindred spirits in many ways, aspiring to compete mostly on cost.
Geocities was at one time the largest web hosting service on the Internet, and was the third most visited website in existence in 1999. It allowed its users to create web pages for free. It hosted at least 38 million web pages. After holdings its IPO on August 10, 1998, Yahoo, then the most popular web site on the Internet, acquired Geocities on January 28, 1999 for $3.57 billion.