At the end of August 2024, Anandtech shut down rather suddenly and unexpectedly, ending a run that dated back to April 3, 1997. I thought about writing something at the time, but really needed longer to collect my thoughts. I

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On August 29, 1953, the Tokyo Television Acoustic Company was founded. Later in the decade it merged with the Tokyo Electro-Acoustic Company, and the combined company took the name TEAC. The combined company specialized in designing and manufacturing tape recorders.

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Digg was a high flying news aggregation site from the early web 2.0 era that still exists today, but really in name only. It serves as a cautionary too for why high profile websites tend not to make major changes

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On August 25, 1991, Linus Torvalds wrote a message that changed the world. He didn’t expect that when he wrote it, that’s clear from the message and some of the replies. He had something he wanted to share with his

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It was on August 24, 1995 that Windows 95 was released, amidst much anticipation. It was the most widely anticipated Windows release of all time, and the runner up really isn’t close. The idea of people lining up for blocks

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Microsoft QuickBasic was a commercially available programming language for MS-DOS, initially released August 18, 1985. Qbasic, the Basic interpreter included with MS-DOS versions 5 and 6, was a cut-down version of QuickBasic. Most notably, the bundled version lacked the ability

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On August 20, 1986, Adobe Systems held its initial public offering. Priced at around $11 per share, Adobe has split its stock six times since. Adobe: The sleeper tech stock of 1986 1986 was a good year for tech stocks.

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On August 19, 1974, Chuck Peddle, Bill Mensch, Rod Orgill, Harry Bawcom, Ray Hirt, Terry Holdt, Wil Mathys, and Mike Janes quit their jobs at Motorola to venture out on their own, founding MOS Technology. The eight had worked on

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Egghead Software was a US retail store that sold computer software from 1984 to 2001. It declared bankruptcy 25 years ago this week, on August 18, 2001, after an attempted reinvention as a dotcom selling online failed. Why did Egghead

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August 17, 2000 was a major milestone for the Internet. You could argue it’s the day the Internet went mainstream, completing the transition from something computer science students used in college to something their parents would use to buy books

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The IBM PC Compact Printer is a bit of a misnomer, as it was really intended for the PCjr. But it ended up working with a bunch of other computers as well as part of its second act. Here’s the

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On August 14, 1984, Commodore International purchased Amiga Corporation for $27 million, with the expectation of bringing Amiga’s multitasking computer with high-color graphics and sound to market within a year. It took a little longer than that, and it created

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The IBM 5170 PC/AT, launched August 14, 1984, is a very popular retro PC, for several reasons. It was the last of the open architecture IBM PCs. And from 1984 to about mid-1987, it was the fastest and most expensive

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45 years ago today, IBM introduced the original IBM PC. This computer changed the industry and change the world. There is no shortage of analysis about its impact, but I find a lot of it self-serving and, in some cases

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It was 27 years ago this week, on Aug 11, 1999, that Red Hat, the Linux vendor, conducted its IPO. It was not the biggest IPO of 1999, and it wasn’t even the biggest Linux-related IPO of 1999. But Red

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MP3 piracy was born August 10, 1996. That day, a pirate using the handle of Netfrack released a copy of Metallica’s Until it Sleeps for free download on IRC, an Internet protocol intended for chat, not file sharing. It’s appropriate

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The early star of the dot-com boom wasn’t Amazon or Ebay, it was Netscape, a company who produced a web browser of the same name. It went boom high and it went boom fast as it rose. And when it

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On August 6, 1997, Apple and Microsoft reached a truce, to the tune of $150 million. At an Apple event, the two companies announced Microsoft invested $150 million in Apple, leaving everyone wondering why. The whole event had a weird

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The eBay domain name was registered 31 years ago today, on August 4, 1995. But the site we know today as Ebay didn’t launch until almost month later, September 3, 1995, under a different name. Auctionweb, the original name for

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When Radio Shack announced its TRS-80 Model 1 on Aug 3, 1977, designer Steve Leininger thought they could sell 50,000 units. Tandy executives didn’t believe him. But the response overwhelmed the company, and 250,000 people put their money where their

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On August 2, 2000, a second-tier Linux vendor acquired a struggling Unix vendor. The merger received some press, but if you weren’t really following Linux at the time, it would have been easy enough to miss. But the merger of

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It was 30 years ago this week, on July 31, 1996, that Microsoft released Windows NT 4.0 to manufacturing. The workstation version appeared on store shelves a month later, with the server version following in September. In many ways, version

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Here’s a late ’80s memory you may not have thought about in a while. Do you remember going to the video rental store to rent a video game and getting the cartridge but not getting the instruction booklet? The reason

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Who did more than any other person in history to make computers affordable? My nomination goes to Sir Clive Sinclair, who was born July 30, 1940. And I’m an American who never used one of his computers. Clive Sinclair: King

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On June 29, 1993, IBM released the first energy star computer, the IBM PS/2 E. The “E” stood for energy. But while it was undeniably more efficient than other desktop PCs, arguably it was a PS/2 in name only. To

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I’ve talked a lot about the advantages and disadvantages of old milestone operating systems. But what were the advantages and disadvantages of Windows NT 3.1, first released July 27, 1993? That’s a fair question, and there are valid reasons it

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ARCNET was the first commercially available local area network standard, beating both Ethernet and Token Ring to market. Conceptually, it had similarities with both, and because it was inexpensive and efficient, it was popular for a good 15 years or

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David Bunnell, born July 25, 1947, was the founder of three of the most successful computer magazines of all time. He even edited two of them simultaneously, straddling two very different worlds. He was not only a pioneer of tech

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On July 23, 1996, Novell sold the intellectual property of Digital Research to Linux vendor Caldera. The common thread the two companies had was Ray Noorda. Noorda had been CEO of Novell and was Novell’s largest shareholder, and Caldera was

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On July 23, 1985, Commodore introduced its Amiga 1000 computer. And let’s just say the world wasn’t ready for it yet. Dave Haynie, a Commodore engineer who worked on the later models, has said there was no such thing as

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