The Silicon Underground

Monorail: Pioneering $999 PCs from 1996

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 11:00:50 +0000

Monorail was a short-lived PC vendor from the late 1990s and early 2000s. Founded November 2, 1995, they were the first company to sell a Pentium-class PC including a display for under $1,000. And Monorail PCs were the first desktop

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How Donkey Kong toppled Atari

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 11:00:46 +0000

In July 1981, at the height of Pac-Man fever, Nintendo released its third stand up arcade game. This game, Donkey Kong, took over as the most popular arcade game in the world, but it had a lasting repercussions. It irreversibly

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Ray Kassar, former Atari CEO

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 11:00:45 +0000

Raymond Edward Kassar was born January 2, 1928 and died December 10, 2017, aged 89, in Vero Beach, Florida. Ray Kassar was president, and later CEO, of Atari Inc. from 1978 to 1983. Atari’s parent company, Warner Bros, hired him

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Why IBM bought Lotus

Dave Farquhar — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 11:00:52 +0000

On July 6, 1995, IBM bought Lotus Development for $3.5 billion. Lotus had once been the second largest software publisher in the world and was worth $5.5 billion at its IPO. Its flagship product, the spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3, had been

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Compute!’s Gazette magazine, 1983-1995

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 11:00:24 +0000

In July 1983, one of my personal favorite Commodore computer magazines of all time, Compute!’s Gazette, was born. An offshoot of the general computer magazine Compute!, Gazette’s first issue was dated July 1983 and quickly proved successful, closely following the

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Jack Tramiel and Atari

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 11:00:43 +0000

On July 2, 1984, Atari got a new owner. After a disastrous 1983, its owner, Warner Communications, wanted out, just a year and a half after Atari had $2 billion in sales. It went from being called the greatest acquisition

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The earliest surviving Tom’s Hardware Guide article

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 11:00:26 +0000

The earliest dated article still active on Tom’s Hardware Guide is dated July 1, 1996. It was an article about CPU softmenus, something we pretty much take for granted today, but at the time was only available on select Abit

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Apricot Computers: An underrated British brand

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 11:00:31 +0000

You hear a lot about Sinclair and Amstrad and Acorn computers. But when it comes to British brands, it seems like we don’t hear a lot about Apricot. But thanks to a television program that aired in early 1990, we

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What happened to Altavista

Dave Farquhar — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 11:00:02 +0000

For as long as I can remember, my home page has been about:blank. But for a good chunk of the 1990s, I would have done well to set it to altavista.digital.com. Here’s what happened to Altavista, the search engine that

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Spyglass: A web browsing pioneer’s IPO

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 11:00:08 +0000

Quick: Who was the first browser manufacturer to hold an IPO in the dotcom era? Netscape? WRONG! Its competitor Spyglass beat it out, holding its IPO June 27, 1995. Its IPO did rather well too, issuing two million shares at

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