The Silicon Underground

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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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Sun Microsystems was a high flying technology company for much of the 80s, 90s, and even early into the 21st century. But they fell fast and they fell hard. Although they were not a dotcom company, having had their IPO on March 4, 1986, the dotcom bust mortally wounded Sun. The result of that was on January 27, 2010, Oracle acquired Sun for $7.4 billion. And slowly but surely, Oracle is retiring parts of that Sun legacy.

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The biggest company in the AI era held its IPO during the dotcom era, on January 22, 1999. That company was Nvidia, who offered 3.5 million shares priced at $12 each. It had been founded April 5, 1993.

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For nearly two decades, Intel was a go-to brand not just for CPUs but also for motherboards. On January 20, 2013, Intel pulled out of the market, ending an era. Here's why Intel stopped making motherboards.

Intel saw motherboard production as a way to protect its brand identity more than as a profit center. Once the industry had several other companies producing motherboards that met acceptable quality standards, Intel had little reason to stay. The key to understanding Intel's motherboard business is understanding Intel's mindset. Intel will introduce products just to sell or protect another product, then leave that market when the product no longer needs that support.

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Transmeta may be most notable today for its $273 million IPO on Nov 7, 2000 being the last successful tech IPO until the Google IPO in 2004. But on January 19, 2000, Transmeta's big news was its new Crusoe CPU.

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In the late 90s and early 2000s, the gadget that said more than any other that you had arrived was the Blackberry, a little device from Research in Motion that let you read your e-mail and respond to it from anywhere. And then it became old-fashioned just as quickly as it burst onto the scene. What happened to Blackberry?

You might be surprised to hear the company is still around and that you can still buy Blackberry phones. But the device that made it famous, introduced January 19, 1999, isn't retro enough to be cool again and isn't its future. And it knows it.

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We need to talk about the year 2038 problem. The year 2038 problem exists on Unix and Unix-like systems, and other software that borrowed the Unix time standard. The problem is that on January 19, 2038, the 32 bit integer that Unix uses to represent time is going to wrap around. And then the computer is going to think it is December 13, 1901. If this sounds a lot like the Y2K problem, you're not wrong. The dates involved are different, but the effect is very similar.

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