─── THE 1990s WING ───
the dial-up era. AOL chatrooms, the first social experiments, the GIFs that never stopped looping.
473 dead. ordered by year of death, newest first.
pre80s | 80s | [90s] | 00s | 10s (2010-2014 · 2015-2019) | 20s
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1999-12-31
Tamagotchi (the cultural fad) (1996 - 1999)
the bandai virtual pet keychain. you fed it, played with it, cleaned its poop. if you ignored it for too long, it died. peak fad was 1996 to 1999. schools...
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1999-12-31
TBBS (The Bread Board System) (1983 - 1999)
the bread board system. philip l. becker's commercial multiline dos bbs package, first shipped in 1983. esoft inc. was incorporated around it in 1984. fully...
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1999-12-31
HP 200LX (1994 - 1999)
hp shipped the 200lx in august 1994: a palmtop running ms-dos 5.0 with a tiny qwerty keyboard and lotus 1-2-3 in rom. it ran on two aa batteries for weeks. hp...
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1999-12-31
Borland Sidekick (1984 - 1999)
borland sidekick was the first piece of software that taught dos users a popup utility was possible. ctrl-alt and a calculator appeared over your wordstar...
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1999-12-31
Imagine Radio (1998 - 1999)
imagine radio launched in march 1998 out of a magazine publisher and let you build a radio station by naming artists and scoring each one from zero to five. it...
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1999-12-31
Finger (1971 - 1990s)
finger let you type a person's name at a machine you had no account on and get back their full name, whether they were logged in, how long they had been idle...
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1999-12-31
Veronica (1992 - 1999)
veronica was the search engine for gopherspace, written in november 1992 by steven foster and fred barrie at the university of nevada, reno. it crawled...
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1999-12-31
Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (1964 - 1999)
at four in the morning on 1 may 1964, two teletypes at dartmouth college got answers back from the same computer at the same time. john kemeny and thomas kurtz...
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1999-12-30
GEnie (1985 - 1999)
general electric's dial-up online service from 1985 to 1999. it ran on the same time-sharing mainframes ge sold to enterprise customers during business hours,...
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1999-12-20
Number Nine Visual Technology (1982 - 1999)
seventeen years of graphics cards, and the part people still repeat is the boot screen. number nine took its name from a beatles track and printed a matching...
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1999-12-01
Spectrum HoloByte (1983 - 1999)
sphere inc founded in boulder colorado in 1983 by jeff sauter with two co-founders, the company merged with nexa in 1987 and rebranded as spectrum holobyte...
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1999-12-01
MUD1 (1978 - 1999)
roy trubshaw wrote it at the university of essex in 1978 on a pdp-10, and richard bartle finished it over the three years that followed. compuserve sold it to...
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1999-11-24
MegaWars III (1984 - 1999)
kesmai put a persistent galaxy on compuserve in january 1984 and ran it in cycles of about a month, each one ending with somebody crowned emperor and the map...
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1999-11-24
OZ Virtual (1996 - 1999)
24 november 1999 is the day oz interactive spun its visual technology group out into a company called smartvr, and that is the day oz virtual stopped being a...
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1999-11-19
OnSale.com (1995 - 1999)
onsale.com was jerry kaplan's auction site launched in may 1995, four months before ebay went public on the web. it ran the "yankee auction" format on consumer...
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1999-11-12
Periphonics Corporation (1969 - 1999)
bohemia, new york, december 1969: four people started a company to make computers answer telephones, two decades before anyone called that an industry. exxon...
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1999-11-03
Packard Bell (1986 - 1999)
packard bell bought a dead radio trademark for under a hundred thousand dollars in 1986 and turned it into the best selling home computer in america by 1995....
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1999-11-01
ONElist (1997 - 1999)
onelist was the free mailing-list service mark fletcher coded by himself in 1997 and opened publicly in january 1998. it grew to over a million lists before...
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1999-11-01
Healtheon (1996 - 1999)
healtheon was the third internet company jim clark started, after silicon graphics and netscape. clark and pavan nigam founded it in early 1996 to put...
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1999-10-26
NetGravity (1995 - 1999)
netgravity wrote the software that let a website serve its own advertising instead of renting the job out to somebody else's network. adserver shipped in...
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1999-10-12
Data General (1968 - 1999)
edson de castro's design for a new machine was turned down inside digital, so he left with two colleagues and built it somewhere else. the nova shipped in 1969...
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1999-10-01
Prodigy (1984 - 1999)
one of the three big dial-up online services in the US, alongside compuserve and aol. it was a walled garden with weather, news, banking, and chat. it could...
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1999-10-01
TEN (Total Entertainment Network) (1996 - 1999)
ten was the first commercial online pc gaming service to go live, in september 1996, a paid dial-in matchmaking and chat platform for quake and command &...
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1999-10-01
Banyan VINES (1984 - 1999)
banyan systems shipped vines out of westboro massachusetts in october 1984 with streettalk, a globally consistent directory service that nobody else had at the...
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1999-10-01
Microsoft NetShow (1996 - 1999)
netshow was the brand microsoft used between 1996 and 1999 for their internet-streaming stack. it shipped on iis 3.0 and ran on nt servers. the whole product...
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1999-10-01
MECC (1973 - 1999)
mecc was the minnesota educational computing consortium, a state agency founded in 1973 to run time-sharing computers for minnesota public schools. it became...
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1999-10-01
Rise Technology (1993 - 1999)
1998 was a terrible year to arrive with a cheap x86 processor, which is the year rise technology arrived with one. the mp6 was a clean small design, three...
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1999-10-01
Real3D (1995 - 1999)
more than 200,000 sega arcade boards carried graphics hardware from a lockheed martin subsidiary in orlando, out of a line of work that began with a docking...
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1999-09-30
Cleveland Free-Net (1986 - 1999)
a medical school professor put a question-and-answer board online in 1984 so patients could ask doctors things, and by 1986 it had turned into a free public...
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1999-09-30
Gamest (1986 - 1999)
a japanese magazine about arcade machines and nothing else, first printed on 5 may 1986 and coming out every two weeks by 1993. it started on shoot 'em ups and...
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1999-09-24
Sequent Computer Systems (1983 - 1999)
eighteen people walked out of intel in 1983, most of them off a processor project that had just been cancelled, and built a machine that ran unix across thirty...
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1999-09-15
WebChat Broadcasting System (1990 - 1999)
before every portal ran a chat product, wbs was where you went to talk to strangers in a browser window with nothing installed. a million registered users by...
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1999-09-01
HotWired (1994 - 1999)
hotwired launched on october 27, 1994 as the first commercial online magazine. it carried the first banner ad ever sold on the web, an at&t spot that ran on...
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1999-08-31
Firefly Network (1995 - 1999)
firefly went up in october 1995 out of a media lab recommendation engine called homr, and it worked by asking you to rate records and then matching your...
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1999-08-30
FilePile.com (1996 - 1999)
1.2 million files on a t3 line in wisconsin, indexed and searchable from a browser three years before that was ordinary. filepile.com was the web face of the...
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1999-08-13
Iridium (1998-2001 original) (1998 - 2001)
motorola-backed satellite-phone consortium that put 66 active low-orbit satellites in the sky to make voice and paging work from anywhere on earth. commercial...
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1999-08-05
Star Division (1985 - 1999)
a sixteen-year-old in lüneburg started selling a word processor his friends had written, and fourteen years later the suite it turned into held about a quarter...
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1999-08-03
Cyrix (1988 - 1999)
cyrix built processors that beat intel on the work people actually did and lost to intel on the one benchmark everyone printed. it never owned a factory and...
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1999-08-01
Dunkindonuts.org (1997 - 1999)
a twenty-five year old schoolteacher in hamden, connecticut could not get one percent milk at the dunkin' donuts near him in 1997, so he registered the...
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1999-07-22
PowerAnimator (1988 - 1999)
the liquid metal man in terminator 2 cost about 460 thousand dollars a minute of screen time, and he was modeled and animated in poweranimator on silicon...
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1999-07-19
Microsoft Sidewalk (1997 - 1999)
sidewalk was microsoft's attempt to put the urban weekly newspaper on the web. listings, restaurant reviews, hip features, one portal per us city. it lost...
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1999-07-01
Hayes Communications (1977 - 1999)
hayes built the smartmodem in 1981 and the AT command set with it. every modem after that, including the cheap clones, spoke hayes. the company itself missed...
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1999-06-24
Ascend Communications (1988 - 1999)
two million dial-up ports went out of one company in alameda, california, and they are the reason a modem in 1997 got an answer. ascend built the max and then...
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1999-06-22
Alando (1999 - 1999)
alando was an ebay copy built in berlin by six people in their twenties, three of them the samwer brothers, and it went online on 1 march 1999. it was in...
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1999-06-16
DIVX (Digital Video Express) (1998 - 1999)
a disc you bought but did not own. circuit city sold DIVX discs cheap, then made them go dark two days after you first hit play unless you paid again. buyers...
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1999-06-15
eaasySabre (1985 - 1999)
eaasysabre was american airlines opening a consumer door into its own reservation system in 1985, over a modem, at a time when the alternative was a travel...
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1999-06-01
Sensible Software (1986 - 1999)
sensible software was two men from chelmsford who had been at school together and who spent thirteen years drawing the smallest sprites in europe. sensible...
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1999-05-23
FastTracker II (1994 - 1999)
two members of a swedish demo group wrote a music tracker for dos and put it out in november 1994. the xm format that came with it held up to thirty-two...
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1999-05-20
USSB (1994 - 1999)
17 june 1994: two companies started selling television off the same satellites to the same 18-inch dish. directv took the general channels and ussb took the...
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1999-05-01
Wang Laboratories (1951 - 1999)
founded by an wang in 1951 on the back of his magnetic-core memory work. by the mid-eighties wang word processors sat on the desk of every secretary in roughly...
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1999-04-26
Pathfinder (1994 - 1999)
time warner opened pathfinder in october 1994 as a single front door to every magazine it owned, and spent somewhere north of a hundred million dollars keeping...
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1999-04-08
Impulse Tracker (1995 - 1999)
jeffrey lim released impulse tracker on christmas day 1995, a free dos program written in assembly, and within two years it was what you used if you wanted a...
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1999-04-01
Practical Peripherals (1981 - 1999)
a patent fight over the hayes at command set ended in august 1989 with hayes owning the company it had been fighting. practical peripherals spent the 1980s...
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1999-03-17
Music Boulevard (1995 - 1999)
music boulevard was the online cd store that stood between cdnow and amazon in the last window before napster made the whole business obsolete. n2k encoded...
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1999-03-09
ElectricalFire (1997 - 1999)
in january 1998 netscape cancelled the java compiler it had been building for a year, five months before it was due to ship. twelve months later it put the...
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1999-03-05
UltraHLE (1999 - 1999)
two people working under the handles realityman and epsilon released an emulator that ran commercial nintendo 64 games on a home pc at a playable frame rate,...
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1999-03-01
Xing MP3 Player (1996 - 2000)
the windows mp3 player from xing technology that mattered between 1996 and 1998 before winamp ate everyone. its encoder was even more consequential. xing's mp3...
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1999-03-01
Kinetix (1996 - 1999)
autodesk renamed its multimedia division kinetix in 1996, weeks before it shipped 3d studio max for windows nt. the program was written for it by the yost...
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1999-02-28
Ionica (1991 - 1999)
ionica sold british households a telephone line that arrived through the air instead of down a copper pair, which meant a customer could leave bt without...
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1999-02-06
Searchlight BBS (1985 - 1999)
frank larosa wrote searchlight for the trs-80 in 1985 and moved it to the pc two years later, and the thing that set it apart was that it looked like a program...
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1999-02-01
Zip2 (1995 - 1999)
before paypal, before tesla, before spacex, before the public musk era, there was a small office in palo alto where elon musk and his brother kimbal were...
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1999-02-01
Purple Moon (1996 - 1999)
purple moon was brenda laurel's attempt to build computer games for girls between eight and fourteen, using four years of interviews she had run at interval...
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1999-02-01
7th Level (1993 - 1999)
7th level was a texas cd-rom house built on the idea that a computer with a disc drive and a sound card was a comedy delivery machine. it licensed monty...
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1999-02-01
Prevue Channel (1981 - 1999)
tulsa, oklahoma sent out a data stream, and in cable headends across the united states a commodore amiga turned it into a blue grid that scrolled forever under...
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1999-02-01
ComputerLand (1976 - 1999)
hayward, california, september 1976: ten thousand dollars went into a store called computer shack, radio shack's lawyers made it change the name, and inside...
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1999-02-01
Shiva Corporation (1985 - 1999)
two mit graduates started a company in cambridge in 1985 to sell appletalk boxes, and ended up in the business of answering the telephone. the lanrover let an...
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1999-01-17
Cyborganic (1993 - 1999)
ramona avenue, san francisco, 1993: one block long, where a group of friends rented apartments next to each other so they could share a connection and eat...
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1999-01-14
International Lyrics Server (1997 - 1999)
the international lyrics server was the first big searchable lyrics database on the open web. one swiss guy named pascal de vries ran it out of his home...
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1999-01-10
AST Research (1980 - 1999)
ast started in 1980 selling expansion cards that fixed what ibm had left out of its own pc, and spent the eighties turning that into a computer company of its...
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1999-01-08
Encore Computer (1983 - 1999)
an american rule against foreign control of defense suppliers is why a parallel computing startup from massachusetts ended up owning a flight simulator...
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1999-01-06
Radius Inc. (1986 - 1999)
burrell smith drew the digital board of the first macintosh, left apple in 1986 and spent the next twelve years selling the parts apple would not: a screen big...
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1999-01-01
Sega Nomad (1995 - 1999)
a full genesis with a screen attached. october 1995 in north america only. one million units sold, two to three hours of battery on six aa cells, no follow-up...
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1999-01-01
AOL Greenhouse (1995 - 1999)
greenhouse was the aol studios in-house incubator ted leonsis ran from 1995 onward. the program took 1200 user-submitted online show ideas and turned roughly...
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1999-01-01
Mandic BBS (1990 - 1999)
mandic was the bbs that became a commercial isp before the brazilian web really existed. aleksandar mandić opened it on 22 april 1990 from a spare room in his...
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1999-01-01
The Major BBS (1986 - 1999)
tim stryker wrote a library that let a single dos machine hold dozens of phone calls at the same time, then built a bulletin board on top of it to prove the...
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1999-01-01
American Laser Games (1989 - 1999)
robert grebe built shooting simulators for police departments in albuquerque and then pointed the same rig at arcades. mad dog mccree arrived in 1990: a sony...
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1999-01-01
Rainbow Arts (1984 - 1999)
rainbow arts was the german home computer publisher that got famous twice for the same reason, which was copying american and japanese games closely enough to...
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1999-01-01
Dark Sun Online: Crimson Sands (1996 - 1999)
ssi built an advanced dungeons and dragons world for at&t's interchange network, at&t closed the network before the game was finished, and total entertainment...
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1999-01-01
Beltel (1986 - 1999)
the videotex system run by the south african department of posts and telecommunications, and later by telkom, launched in 1986 on the british prestel standard....
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1999-01-01
Greenpoint (1992 - 1999)
greenpoint was ptt telecom's cheap answer to the car phone in the netherlands, a cordless handset that worked off your own base station at home and off roughly...
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1999-01-01
Elastic Reality (1993 - 1999)
morphing was the effect of the early nineties and this was the program that did it properly. it came out of asdg in madison, wisconsin, an amiga software house...
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1999-01-01
Sharp X68000 (1987 - 1999)
march 1987, and only in japan. sharp put arcade-grade sprite and scrolling hardware into a home computer, charged 369,000 yen for it, and never exported a...
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1999-01-01
Exidy (1973 - 1999)
april 1976 is the date that matters here. exidy shipped a driving cabinet where the things you ran over screamed and left tombstones on the track, an...
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1999-01-01
Macsyma (1968 - 1999)
seventy percent of the symbolic math market in 1987, one percent by 1992. macsyma was written at mit's project mac from 1968 onward, in maclisp, and it was...
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1999-01-01
Opcode Systems (1985 - 1999)
dave oppenheim wrote a midi sequencer for the macintosh in 1985 and spent the next fourteen years deciding what a sequencer window looks like. studio vision...
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1999-01-01
Acorn Computers (1978 - 1999)
by 1999 acorn's holding in arm was worth more than every share in acorn put together, so the market was pricing twenty years of computers at less than nothing....
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1999-01-01
TURNET (1996 - 1999)
three lines to the united states, two out of istanbul and one out of ankara, shared by around eighty service providers. that was turkey's commercial internet...
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1999-01-01
Sony Ruvi (1998 - 1999)
124 millimeters long and 380 grams, which in 1998 was small enough to be the entire pitch. sony got there by building the record head into the tape cartridge,...
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1999-01-01
D2000-2 (1992 - 1999)
reuters shipped automatic matching to the foreign exchange market in april 1992 and briefly owned the plumbing of the largest market on earth. within eighteen...
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1999
Fidelipac (1959 - 1999)
a plastic box with a loop of quarter-inch tape inside that never had to be rewound. radio ran on these for forty years. you pressed a button, the cart started...
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1999
Simulmondo (1988 - 1999)
francesco carlà was a music journalist who wrote a videogame column for an italian computer magazine, and in 1987 he used the column to advertise for italians...
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1998-12-31
Philips CD-i (1991 - 1998)
philips cd-i was a 1991 multimedia console aimed at the living room. it was too expensive, underpowered for games, and saddled with the worst zelda spinoffs...
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1998-12-31
The ImagiNation Network (1991 - 1998)
the sierra network launched may 1991 out of oakhurst, california as ken williams's "cyberspace theme park" for sierra on-line. it was a dial-up commercial...
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1998-12-31
Mondo 2000 (1989 - 1998)
mondo 2000 was a berkeley quarterly published from 1989 to 1998, edited by r.u. sirius and queen mu, art-directed by bart nagel. the masthead grew out of the...
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1998-12-31
Microsoft Music Central (1996 - 1998)
music central was the music-encyclopedia volume of the microsoft home cd-rom line. it shipped in 1996 with the guinness encyclopedia of popular music licensed...
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1998-12-01
Casio Loopy (1995 - 1998)
casio loopy was the 32-bit home console casio shipped in japan on october 19 1995, sold as my computer tv for girls. the hook was a built-in thermal color...
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1998-12-01
InfoVía (1995 - 1998)
telefónica had the monopoly on the line and used it to build a second internet with a gate on it. from anywhere in spain you dialed 055 at a local rate, and...
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1998-11-30
CyberFlix (1993 - 1998)
bill appleton had written world builder and supercard before he started a game studio in knoxville, tennessee on 28 june 1993, which is not where anyone was...
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1998-11-25
Arena (1993 - 1998)
arena was not a product. dave raggett wrote it in 1993 so there would be something on screen that could display the html draft he was proposing, and it spent...
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1998-11-25
IBM WebExplorer (1994 - 1998)
ibm wrote a browser for os/2, shipped it with warp in 1994, and took the team apart almost immediately afterward. two years later warp 4 arrived carrying a...
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1998-11-19
Wildcat! BBS (1986 - late 1990s)
mustang software's commercial bbs package for ms-dos. 1986 release. sold to santronics on november 19, 1998. kept limping as winserver until the bbs scene...
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1998-11-18
Starwave (1993 - 1998)
paul allen paid for a company outside seattle that decided a sports fan wanted a newspaper with no bottom to it, and then built the page that proved it. espnet...
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1998-11-17
SyQuest Technology (1982 - 1999)
syquest sold removable hard-disk cartridges to mac desktop publishers from 1982 to 1998. the sq400 44mb cartridge was the way you handed a project file to your...
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1998-11-13
Microsoft Chromeffects (1998 - 1998)
july 1998, siggraph: microsoft previews a markup language for putting 3d scenes on web pages, built on direct3d and wrapped in xml. by november the testers had...
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1998-11-04
DigiCash (1989 - 1998)
digicash was the amsterdam-based startup david chaum founded in 1989 to commercialize blind-signature cryptography as anonymous digital cash. ecash worked....
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1998-11-01
FTP Software (1986 - 1998)
windows 95 shipped with tcp/ip included at no extra charge and that was the entire cause of death, arriving three years early and aimed at nothing in...
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1998-10-15
Quarterdeck QEMM (1988 - 1998)
the dos memory manager that taught a generation of pc users about emm386 and the 384k of upper memory above the 640k line. quarterdeck rode the late dos era...
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1998-10-15
SpryNet (1996 - 1998)
sprynet was compuserve's admission that people had stopped wanting a walled online service and started wanting the internet. it opened on 6 february 1996 at...
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1998-10-01
Quarterdeck DESQview (1985 - 1998)
desqview was a windowing multitasker that shipped four months before windows 1.0 and worked better than it for a long time. quarterdeck built the dos...
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1998-10-01
Davidson & Associates (1982 - 1998)
davidson & associates was a schoolteacher and her husband selling drill software out of torrance, california, and by early 1994 it was doing forty million...
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1998-10
Netscape Netcaster (1997 - 1998)
netscape's answer to the idea that the web should arrive on its own instead of being fetched. it shipped inside communicator in 1997 under the codename...
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1998-09-28
Award Software (1983 - 1998)
phoenix technologies spent most of the nineties as the second bios on asian-built motherboards and fixed that by buying the first one. award's modular bios...
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1998-09-22
The Hornet Archive (1992 - 1998)
hornet was where pc demos and tracker music lived before scene.org existed. it opened on 4 september 1992 as the internet demo site on a university ftp server...
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1998-09-18
InterNIC (1993 - 1998)
for five years there was exactly one counter where every .com on earth got registered, and it was a project run under a national science foundation cooperative...
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1998-09-01
Racal-Datacom (1955 - 1998)
a british defense electronics group owned a florida modem maker for twenty-one years and put its own name in front of it. racal-datacom sold the equipment at...
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1998-08-31
Bay Networks (1994 - 1998)
bay networks was assembled in 1994 out of two companies with no reason to be in the same building, wellfleet in massachusetts and synoptics in california, and...
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1998-08-18
NESticle (1997 - 1998)
icer addis released nesticle on 3 april 1997 and it was the first nes emulator that ran at full speed on the ordinary dos machines people already owned. five...
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1998-08-01
Hercules Computer Technology (1982 - 1998)
fifty percent of the monochrome graphics market by march 1986, and the card that won it existed because a berkeley doctoral student wanted to type thai on an...
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1998-07-31
Sega Channel (1994 - 1998)
sega channel was a cable tv add-on for the sega genesis. you paid your local cable company about $15 a month and plugged a special cartridge into your console....
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1998-07-01
BYTE Magazine (1975 - 1998)
the magazine that taught engineers what was inside the machine for two decades. wayne green and carl helmers founded it in september 1975 and mcgraw-hill...
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1998-07-01
First Virtual Holdings (1994 - 1998)
the first company to take credit cards on the open internet, and it refused to do it the way everyone else later did it. virtual pin meant the card number...
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1998-07-01
Norton Commander (1986 - 1998)
john socha started writing it in 1984 at cornell, peter norton computing shipped it in 1986, and the two-pane orthodox file manager paradigm landed everywhere....
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1998-07-01
Our First Time (1998 - 1998)
a website went up in 1998 calling itself a free educational public service and announcing that two eighteen year olds would lose their virginity on a live...
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1998-07-01
Telebit (1984 - 1998)
paul baran, one of the people who invented packet switching, started telebit in cupertino in 1984, and it built the trailblazer: a modem that spread five...
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1998-07-01
GameTek (1987 - 1998)
north miami beach is not where anyone goes looking for a video game publisher, and gametek was never quite one. it was a rights holder that had bought the...
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1998-06-25
Windows Messaging (1995 - 1998)
august 1995 put an icon called inbox on every windows desktop on earth, and most of the people who clicked it had nothing to connect it to. underneath was...
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1998-06-22
Brøderbund (1980 - 1998)
brøderbund was the eugene-then-novato software publisher founded in 1980 by the carlston siblings. it shipped prince of persia and the print shop in the 80s,...
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1998-06-15
MacWrite (1984 - 1998)
macwrite was the word processor that shipped with the first macintosh on 24 january 1984. paired with macpaint, it was the pair of killer apps that taught the...
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1998-06-11
Digital Equipment Corporation (1957 - 1998)
dec was the company that made minicomputers a category. ken olsen and harlan anderson founded it in maynard massachusetts in 1957 with seventy thousand dollars...
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1998-06-09
Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit (1991 - 1998)
alan solomon started writing virus detection in 1988 out of a data recovery practice, and by 1993 the product had a queen's award and britain had a serious...
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1998-06-08
Viaweb (1995 - 1998)
viaweb was a 1995 web app for letting small merchants build and host an online store from a browser. paul graham, robert morris and trevor blackwell wrote most...
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1998-06-01
Simtex (1988 - 1998)
master of orion shipped in 1993, and the magazine preview that covered it invented the phrase 4x to describe what it was doing. simtex sold itself to its own...
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1998-05-27
UMAX SuperMac (1996 - 1998)
umax supermac was a line of macintosh clones built in taiwan from 1996, apple motherboards with ordinary pc parts arranged around them. when steve jobs came...
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1998-05-14
PF.Magic (1991 - 1998)
pf.magic was started in san francisco in 1991 to build a genesis modem accessory with at&t and sega. at&t did the manufacturing math and walked, taking half...
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1998-04-01
Eurosignal (1974 - 1998)
the deutsche bundespost switched eurosignal on in 1974 and france joined a year later. it was a pager with no screen, so a call arrived as one of four tone...
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1998-03-14
Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh (1997 - 1998)
the twentieth anniversary mac was apple's 20-year commemorative computer. it had a 12.1 inch lcd in a slim vertical case and a separate floor base unit holding...
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1998-03-10
New Century Network (1995 - 1998)
new century network was the american newspaper industry's attempt to build one website together, back when none of them had worked out the web on their own....
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1998-03-01
Spy Magazine (1986 - 1998)
spy was a satirical monthly out of manhattan from october 1986 to march 1998, founded by kurt andersen and graydon carter as a print magazine that targeted...
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1998-03-01
Sega Net Link (1996 - 1998)
sega released the net link in the united states in october 1996 at one hundred and ninety-nine dollars, a 28.8k modem that slid into the saturn's cartridge...
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1998-03-01
Omni Online (1986 - 1998)
kathy keeton died in september 1997, and the magazine she had started with bob guccione in 1978 did not outlast her by half a year. omni had already given up...
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1998-02-27
Apple eMate 300 (1997 - 1998)
the emate 300 was apple's last attempt to put the newton in a useful form. it had a real keyboard, a 480x320 grayscale touchscreen, an arm cpu at 25 mhz,...
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1998-02-27
Apple Newton MessagePad (1993 - 1998)
the newton was apple's stylus-driven personal digital assistant, launched in august 1993 and discontinued by steve jobs five months after he returned to apple....
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1998-02-14
ICOM Simulations (1981 - 1998)
tod zipnick started the company as tmq software in march 1981 and was dead of hodgkin's disease by 1991, right as its games were landing. icom built the...
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1998-02-08
Ocean Software (1983 - 1998)
ocean was the manchester software house david ward and jon woods set up in 1983 (first as spectrum games, then renamed when retailers got confused about the...
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1998-02-02
Psychic Friends Network (1991 - 1998)
a baltimore marketing company put dionne warwick in front of a thirty minute infomercial and pointed the viewers at a 1-900 number staffed by around two...
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1998-02-01
NEC PC-FX (1994 - 1998)
the pc-fx was nec's 32-bit console for the japanese home market. it launched on 23 december 1994 with hudson soft as co-developer and a strict anime fmv focus,...
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1998-01-31
Power Computing (1993 - 1998)
steve jobs returned to apple in 1997 and one of the first things he did was end the macintosh clone program, which meant ending this company. stephen kahng had...
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1998-01-22
Claris Emailer (1995 - 1998)
claris emailer was a mid-90s mac email client that did the one thing no other client did: it pulled mail from internet pop, aol, applelink and compuserve into...
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1998-01-21
Erols Internet (1995 - 1998)
erol onaran came to virginia from turkey, opened an electronics repair shop, put videocassettes in it, and ended up running the largest privately owned video...
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1998-01-21
Chips and Technologies (1984 - 1998)
the chipset is the reason a taiwanese board maker could sell you a pc compatible in 1987 at a fraction of ibm's price, and this company invented the category....
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1998-01-01
Taligent (1992 - 1998)
taligent was an object-oriented operating system that stopped being an operating system before it stopped being a company. apple bailed and hp bailed. ibm...
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1998-01-01
DWANGO (1994 - 1998)
dwango was a dial-up matchmaking service for the early first-person shooters, built in houston in early 1994 by bob huntley and kee kimbrell, with some client...
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1998-01-01
SlipKnot (1994 - 1998)
in 1994 a lot of people had internet access that could not run a browser. what they had was a shell account on somebody's unix machine and a terminal program...
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1998-01-01
Microsoft Home (1993 - 1998)
microsoft home was the brand microsoft printed on its consumer shelf from october 1993, and by 1994 it covered more than sixty boxed titles with the category...
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1998-01-01
Macromedia xRes (1994 - 1998)
fred and richard krueger started fauve software in raleigh in 1992, and their first product, matisse, put layers into a commercial paint program a year before...
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1998-01-01
Living Books (1992 - 1998)
broderbund shipped just grandma and me on 7 february 1992, a mercer mayer picture book turned into a cd-rom where the machine read every page aloud and every...
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1998-01-01
CERFnet (1988 - 1998)
susan estrada proposed a california regional network in january 1988 and had it carrying traffic for thirty eight research centers by november 1989. the name...
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1998-01-01
ThunderByte Antivirus (1988 - 1998)
frans veldman built tbav in the netherlands from 1988 and shipped it as shareware, which is how a dutch one-man engine ended up on machines all over europe. it...
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1998-01-01
Ensoniq (1982 - 1998)
the sid chip in the commodore 64 was bob yannes's design, and this was the company he started after it. the mirage put a working sampler on a music shop...
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1998-01-01
ROLM (1969 - 1998)
a corporate campus in santa clara with a swimming pool and a recreation center on it, in the seventies, when the rest of the valley was tilt-up sheds and...
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1998-01-01
Amstrad PCW (1985 - 1998)
alan sugar sketched it on a napkin somewhere over the south china sea in february 1985, after seeing an odd electronic typewriter in a tokyo shop. six months...
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1998-01-01
Passport Designs (1979 - 1998)
canyon.mid sat in the media folder of every copy of windows from 3.1 through 2000, and passport.mid sat next to it from windows 95 on, and both came from a...
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1998-01-01
AMSD Ariadna (1995 - 1998)
five incompatible ways to write russian text were in circulation in 1996, and a page that guessed wrong arrived as a wall of latin garbage. a moscow firm...
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1998
GTE mainStreet (1993 - 1998)
gte spent the late eighties and most of the nineties building a way to put interactive content on a television, out of a test project in cerritos, california....
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1997-12-31
Apple Bandai Pippin (1996 - 1997)
the apple bandai pippin was a six-hundred-dollar internet-and-multimedia console with a game library nobody wanted. apple licensed the platform to bandai. the...
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1997-12-31
Microsoft Cinemania (1992 - 1997)
cinemania was a CD-ROM movie reference, one of the microsoft home suite of "encyclopedia on a disc" titles that included encarta and bookshelf. it shipped...
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1997-12-31
Apple LaserWriter (1985 - 1997)
the apple laserwriter was the first laser printer most people had ever seen paired with a personal computer. it shipped on 1 march 1985 at $6,995, ran a...
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1997-12-31
DiskDoubler (1990 - 1997)
diskdoubler was a classic mac os utility that doubled your effective drive space by compressing files on the fly. it shipped in april 1990 from a tiny outfit...
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1997-12-31
Bi-Bop (1991 - 1997)
bi-bop was france telecom's answer to the price of a gsm handset in 1993. you could make a call while standing within about three hundred meters of a base...
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1997-12-31
Color Dreams (1989 - 1997)
a color dreams cartridge was baby blue instead of nintendo gray, and that was the whole pitch on the outside of the box. dan lawton's company defeated the...
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1997-12-22
Tseng Labs (1983 - 1997)
newtown, pennsylvania is not where you expect the fastest graphics chip of the early nineties to have come from, but that is where jack hsiao nan tseng put his...
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1997-12-02
Network General (1986 - 1997)
mcafee associates put up $1.3 billion in stock and the combined company came out on 2 december 1997 under a name neither of them had used before, which is how...
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1997-12-01
Livingston Enterprises (1986 - 1997)
radius turns thirty-five this year and it is still what decides whether your password gets you onto the network. it was written by a father-and-son company in...
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1997-11-17
ValuJet Airlines (1993 - 1997)
on 11 may 1996 a dc-9 went into the everglades because somebody had loaded expired chemical oxygen generators into the forward cargo hold as company material....
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1997-11-10
Micropolis (1976 - 1997)
four hard drive companies were worth counting when singapore technologies bought micropolis in march 1996, and seven by the time it gave up. the chatsworth...
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1997-10-20
Four11 (1994 - 1997)
four11 was a white pages for the internet, started in menlo park in 1994 by michael santullo and larry drebes, back when finding somebody's email address meant...
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1997-10-08
RocketMail (1996 - 1997)
rocketmail was the free webmail four11 launched in 1996 that yahoo bought in october 1997 for $92 million in stock. the rocketmail engine became yahoo mail....
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1997-09-30
Adobe Persuasion (1988 - 1997)
aldus shipped persuasion 1.0 on the mac in november 1988 as a presentation tool with an outline-driven editing model. a windows port followed in the early...
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1997-09-19
Amdahl Corporation (1970 - 1997)
the man who designed the ibm system/360 walked out of ibm in 1970 and spent the next five years building a machine that ran ibm's own software faster than...
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1997-09-01
Octel Communications (1982 - 1997)
two engineers who met over a broken piece of lab equipment started a company in september 1982 to sell businesses a machine that answered the phone. the first...
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1997-08-29
Tandem Computers (1974 - 1997)
jimmy treybig was running marketing for the hp 3000 and could not get hewlett-packard interested in a computer that never went down, so in 1974 he left and...
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1997-08-24
ASCII Net (1985 - 1997)
ascii net opened as an experiment on 1 may 1985 and became the first commercial dial-up host in japan, run by the company that published the magazines everyone...
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1997-08-01
McDonnell Douglas (1967 - 1997)
a cargo door latch on the dc-10 could read as locked while the pins sat short of their stops. american airlines flight 96 survived that failure over windsor in...
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1997-07-21
Autodesk Animator (1989 - 1997)
jim kent wrote it for the atari st first, as cyber paint, then rebuilt it in 1989 for dos machines with a vga card and two hundred and fifty six colors to work...
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1997-07-19
Neverwinter Nights (AOL) (1991 - 1997)
ssi had the dungeons and dragons license and a gold box engine that already worked on floppy disk. stormfront pointed the same engine at a server on america...
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1997-07-17
F. W. Woolworth Company (1879 - 1997)
nothing on the counter cost more than ten cents, and the fixed price was the whole invention when frank woolworth got his second store working in lancaster,...
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1997-07-01
PCBoard (1983 - 1997)
the high-end dos bbs package. clark development company shipped it from 1983 to 1996, sold more than 50,000 licenses, and went bankrupt in july 1997 without...
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1997-07-01
The Spot (1995 - 1997)
scott zakarin was working at a los angeles ad agency in 1995 when he pitched a serialized drama that would live entirely on a website. five attractive...
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1997-06-08
HyTelnet (1990 - 1997)
before anything crawled the internet, finding a machine you were allowed to log into meant knowing somebody who kept a list. peter scott kept the best list....
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1997-06-01
ClariNet (1989 - 1997)
brad templeton noticed that people were retyping dave barry's newspaper column onto usenet every week and drew the commercial conclusion, which was that a...
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1997-05-14
Microcom (1980 - 1997)
mnp was printed on the side of nearly every modem box sold in the 1990s, and it stood for microcom networking protocol, which is the name of a company in...
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1997-04-30
Sega Game Gear (1990 - 1997)
the game gear was sega's answer to the nintendo game boy. it launched in japan on october 6 1990 with a backlit color screen at a moment when nintendo was...
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1997-04-30
XBAND (1994 - 1997)
catapult entertainment sold a modem hidden in a cartridge shell. you slotted your genesis or snes game on top of it and it dialed a local number. what came...
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1997-04-28
Apple Cyberdog (1996 - 1997)
cyberdog was apple's bet that the internet client should be a set of openable, embeddable components rather than a monolithic browser. the beta arrived...
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1997-04-01
Borland C++ (1991 - 1997)
version 5.02 shipped in april 1997 and there was never another one. borland c++ had spent six years as the compiler you reached for on dos and then on windows...
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1997-03-31
AppleLink (1985 - 1997)
applelink was apple's online service for dealers and developers, running on ge's mainframes from 1985 until apple finally shut it off in march 1997. its...
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1997-03-14
Apple QuickTake (1994 - 1997)
the apple quicktake 100 was one of the first consumer digital cameras anyone could buy, launched on 20 june 1994 at $749 in partnership with kodak. it captured...
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1997-03-14
Apple OpenDoc (1992 - 1997)
opendoc was apple's bet that documents would be built from reusable parts. ibm and novell signed on through a non-profit called ci labs. jobs returned to apple...
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1997-03-03
StarText (1982 - 1997)
the fort worth star-telegram put its newsroom on a dial-up line on 3 may 1982, in partnership with tandy, and called the people who paid for it startexans. it...
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1997-03-01
Video for Windows (1992 - 1997)
microsoft shipped video for windows in november 1992 because apple had already put quicktime on the pc and windows had no video story of its own. it cost...
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1997-02-18
WordPerfect for DOS (1982 - 1997)
wordperfect for dos was the word processor that the 1980s office actually ran on, a blue-and-white screen full of f-key shortcuts and the reveal codes view...
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1997-02-07
NeXT (1985 - 1997)
a one foot magnesium cube with no floppy drive, priced at six thousand five hundred dollars in 1988. it was built for a university market that mostly could not...
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1997-02-04
NeXTSTEP (1989 - 1997)
nextstep was the operating system steve jobs built after he was forced out of apple in 1985. it shipped first on the next cube in september 1989, ran on a mach...
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1997-02-01
InterCon Systems Corporation (1988 - 1997)
kurt baumann and mikki barry started a virginia software house in april 1988 to make macintoshes work on networks that were not macintosh, at a point when it...
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1997-01-31
WOW! from CompuServe (1996 - 1997)
compuserve was a business service that had spent a decade billing by the minute, and by 1996 it could see aol taking the household market with a friendly...
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1997-01-17
Ungermann-Bass (1979 - 1997)
ralph ungermann had already co-founded zilog and walked out of it before he started this one in 1979 with charlie bass, on $1.5 million and a proposition that...
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1997-01-07
NCSA Mosaic (1993 - 1997)
the first browser most people saw the web through. released april 1993 from ncsa at the university of illinois. ran on windows, mac, and unix. it showed images...
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1997-01-01
Berkeley Systems (1987 - 1997)
after dark was the screensaver everyone had on their mac in the early 90s. chrome 1940s toasters with bird wings, drifting across a black void carrying pieces...
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1997-01-01
After Dark (1989 - 1997)
after dark was the modular mac screensaver canon. flying toasters drifted across a black screen carrying bread. that became berkeley systems' identity for a...
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1997-01-01
Leading Edge (1980 - 1997)
leading edge sold printer ribbons and floppy disks out of canton, massachusetts before it put its name on a computer daewoo built in korea. the model d...
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1997-01-01
1-800-MUSIC-NOW (1995 - 1997)
mci spent something like forty million dollars teaching america to buy compact discs over the telephone. you dialed the number and keyed in an artist, then...
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1997-01-01
Genesis Storytime (1983 - 1997)
a canadian cable channel that put children's picture books on the television one page at a time and carried no sound at all, because the point was for a parent...
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1997-01-01
X*Press X*Change (1986 - 1997)
mcgraw-hill and tci put a live newswire on cnn's satellite transponder in late 1986 and let cable systems deliver it into subscriber homes at 9,600 bits per...
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1997-01-01
Rurtel (1986 - 1997)
the arkleton trust, a research charity in the highlands of scotland, put a public dial-up conferencing system on a machine at nethy bridge in 1986 so that...
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1997-01-01
Book Stacks Unlimited (1992 - 1997)
charles stack ran a bookstore out of a dial-up bulletin board in cleveland from 1992, three years ahead of amazon, on an idea he had in 1991 because walk-in...
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1997-01-01
World Wide Web Worm (1994 - 1997)
the worm crawled the web by itself in 1994, at a moment when finding a page meant reading a list somebody maintained by hand. oliver mcbryan built it at the...
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1997-01-01
Neo Geo CD (1994 - 1997)
snk's home cartridges cost more than the console most families owned, so the answer was to press the same games onto compact discs and sell them for a tenth of...
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1997-01-01
The Voyager Company (1984 - 1997)
voyager started in 1984 selling laserdiscs and invented most of what a special edition is, from the widescreen transfer to the commentary track. that label was...
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1997-01-01
Gravis UltraSound (1992 - 1997)
a red circuit board out of british columbia, sold into a market where every other card was green and said sound blaster on the box. the gf1 chip did sample...
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1997-01-01
Kurzweil Applied Intelligence (1982 - 1997)
the auditors from coopers & lybrand found it in the spring of 1994: sales booked against customers who had never signed anything, and the goods themselves...
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1997-01-01
Full Service Network (1994 - 1997)
orlando had working video on demand in december 1994, a decade before youtube and longer than that before anyone streamed a film to a television at home. time...
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1997-01-01
FM Towns (1989 - 1997)
charles townes shared the nobel prize in physics in 1964, and fujitsu had a habit of code-naming computers after nobel laureates, so this one was Townes until...
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1997-01-01
Sega Mega Drive (1988 - 1997)
tokyo, 29 october 1988. sega shipped a home console with an arcade processor inside it and sold through the first production run in two days. north america got...
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1997-01-01
Cyberdreams (1990 - 1997)
h.r. giger looked at what a 1992 pc could draw, said it was jagged, and made them throw away two hundred and forty of their two hundred and fifty-six colors to...
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1997-01-01
iGuide (1996 - 1997)
rupert murdoch and mci spent 1995 planning an online service big enough to take on america online, and what came out of it in march 1996 was iguide, a web...
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1997-01-01
Cyberjack (1995 - 1997)
six developers in south africa wrote a whole internet suite, roughly one application each, and delrina shipped it in 1995 as the first 32-bit way to get on the...
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1996-12-31
3DO Interactive Multiplayer (1993 - 1996)
the 3do was the first major console built on a licensed-hardware bet. panasonic, goldstar, sanyo and creative labs all shipped their own boxes against one...
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1996-12-31
Bandai Playdia (1994 - 1996)
bandai shipped the playdia in japan on 23 september 1994 at 24,800 yen, an 8-bit cd-rom console aimed at small kids with anime tie-ins. the library was 23...
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1996-12-31
Microsoft Creative Writer (1994 - 1996)
creative writer was a word processor for children microsoft shipped on cd-rom in early 1994 under its microsoft kids label. you walked your cursor through a...
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1996-12-31
Microsoft Fine Artist (1994 - 1996)
fine artist was a microsoft kids raster paint program announced on december 7 1993 and shipped in 1994 for windows 3.1 and ms-dos with a separate apple...
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1996-12-31
Microsoft Ancient Lands (1994 - 1996)
ancient lands was a microsoft home cd-rom released in 1994 as a single-subject reference companion to encarta. it covered three ancient civilizations across...
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1996-12-31
Microsoft Multimedia Viewer (1991 - 1996)
multimedia viewer was a microsoft authoring tool for windows cd-rom titles released in september 1991. it sat on top of winhelp, the same help-file engine...
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1996-12-31
BITNET Relay (1985 - 1996)
jeff kell wrote relay at the university of tennessee at chattanooga in 1985, in rexx, on a network of university mainframes where spending bandwidth on...
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1996-12-31
ReadySoft (1987 - 1996)
readysoft was a canadian conversion house that made its name doing something most people thought was impossible, putting don bluth's laserdisc arcade games...
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1996-12-31
The Shadow of Yserbius (1991 - 1996)
the shadow of yserbius was a graphical dungeon crawler that shipped with the sierra network in 1991, built by joe ybarra for sierra on-line. you dialed in,...
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1996-12-31
Sega Technical Institute (1990 - 1996)
mark cerny was twenty five when sega let him open a studio in california whose entire premise was that japanese and american developers should sit in the same...
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1996-12-31
Gottlieb (1927 - 1996)
the flipper is a gottlieb invention. humpty dumpty put six of them on a playfield in 1947 and turned a machine you watched into a game you played, which is the...
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1996-12-16
Weitek (1981 - 1996)
intel killed weitek by moving the math coprocessor onto the same piece of silicon as the processor. for most of the 1980s a weitek floating-point chip was the...
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1996-12-05
Stratton Oakmont (1989 - 1996)
on 5 december 1996 the national association of securities dealers expelled the firm, fined it $500,000 and ordered restitution, which put it out of business....
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1996-12-01
Global Network Navigator (1993 - 1996)
gnn was the first commercial web publication and carried the first clickable banner ad. o'reilly launched it in may 1993, aol bought it for $11 million in june...
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1996-12-01
FutureWave Software (1993 - 1996)
a drawing program for a tablet computer nobody bought, ported to desktops where it could not beat illustrator, then given a timeline and pointed at the web in...
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1996-11-19
Microsoft Schedule+ (1992 - 2003)
schedule+ was microsoft's pre-outlook calendar program, first released in 1992 for windows 3.0 and classic mac os as the companion to microsoft mail. it...
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1996-11-08
W3 Catalog (1993 - 1996)
oscar nierstrasz put a search box in front of the web on 2 september 1993, at the university of geneva, and it was the first one. it crawled nothing: it...
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1996-11-04
MCC Interim Linux (1992 - 1996)
owen le blanc wanted to install linux on a room full of university machines without assembling each one by hand out of ftp files, so in february 1992 he wrote...
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1996-11-01
Mirsky's Worst of the Web (1995 - 1996)
mirsky's worst of the web was a one-page link site that posted about three bad-website picks per week with a one-line acidic comment under each. david mirsky,...
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1996-10-15
Memorex Corporation (1961 - 1996)
laurence spitters and three other ampex men set up in santa clara in 1961 to make computer tape, and by 1968 memorex was shipping the first ibm compatible disk...
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1996-10-01
SoftKey (1986 - 1996)
softkey was a toronto software publisher founded in 1986 by kevin oleary and john freeman with a ten-thousand-dollar loan from oleary's mother. through the...
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1996-10-01
Nazca Corporation (1994 - 1996)
nazca was about thirty people who walked out of irem in 1994 when the arcade division stopped, set up in suita on the edge of osaka, and shipped two games in...
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1996-10
Digital Compact Cassette (1992 - 1996)
digital compact cassette was philips answering the wrong question very well. it was a digital tape that would still play the analog cassettes already on your...
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1996-09-01
Bajtek (1985 - 1996)
bajtek arrived in september 1985 as the first polish magazine about computers written for people who were not already engineers, sponsored by the communist...
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1996-08-31
Nintendo Virtual Boy (1995 - 1996)
the virtual boy was gunpei yokoi's last full hardware project at nintendo. red led arrays, oscillating mirrors, parallax stereoscopy, a tabletop tripod, a...
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1996-08-30
anon.penet.fi (1993 - 1996)
anon.penet.fi was a machine in helsinki that johan helsingius ran out of his own pocket, and for three years it was how you spoke on usenet without signing...
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1996-08-01
Copland (1994 - 1996)
copland was apple's attempt to build a modern operating system in-house before the 90s ran out. named after the composer aaron copland, the project started in...
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1996-07-30
Atari Jaguar (1993 - 1996)
the jaguar was atari's last home console and the last hardware atari corporation ever shipped. it launched at $249.99 in november 1993 with a slogan about...
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1996-07-30
Atari Corporation (1984 - 1996)
atari corporation was jack tramiel's second act after he walked out of commodore in january 1984. he bought atari inc's consumer division from warner...
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1996-07-15
Escom AG (1986 - 1996)
escom was a german computer retailer that grew from a side business into eleven percent of the german pc market, then spent 1995 buying things it could not...
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1996-07-15
CERN httpd (1990 - 1996)
cern httpd was the first web server. tim berners-lee wrote it on a next machine at cern and for six years it was the program that answered when something asked...
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1996-07-01
Mercury Center (1993 - 1996)
mercury center was the san jose mercury news on america online, opened on 10 may 1993 with the whole paper inside it and about two hundred stories that never...
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1996-07-01
MindVox (1991 - 1996)
mindvox was a new york dial-up service started in december 1991 by two former members of the legion of doom, and for about four years it was where the city's...
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1996-07-01
The Pipeline (1993 - 1996)
the pipeline started in december 1993 in new york, built by a science writer and a programmer who had met over a bridge table. it was the first internet...
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1996-07-01
ChiWriter (1986 - 1996)
cay horstmann wrote a scientific word processor in roughly four thousand lines of c and sold it for ten years, to physicists and mathematicians who wanted an...
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1996-06-11
Microsoft Mail (1988 - 1996)
microsoft mail was the lan-based email client that ran on every microsoft platform of the late 1980s and early 1990s, plus mac and os/2 for good measure. it...
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1996-06-01
Video On Line (1994 - 1996)
nicola grauso was a sardinian publisher who put l'unione sarda on the web in march 1994 and then decided that what italy needed was not more content but...
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1996-06-01
Microsoft Anti-Virus (1993 - 1996)
microsoft anti-virus shipped inside ms-dos 6 on 30 march 1993 and knew about 1,234 viruses. it had no way of ever learning a 1,235th, because updates lived on...
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1996-06-01
MasPar (1987 - 1996)
digital equipment sold this machine under its own name and called it the decmpp, which tells you most of what you need to know about maspar's position in its...
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1996-04-09
UdiWWW (1995 - 1996)
udiwww was a windows browser written by one person at the university of ulm, and for a few months in 1995 and 1996 it did things netscape could not do. it...
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1996-04-01
Lotus Improv (1991 - 1996)
lotus improv was a spreadsheet that ran on a workstation almost nobody owned. it launched on nextstep in february 1991, got a windows port in may 1993, was...
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1996-04-01
U.S. Gold (1984 - 1996)
u.s. gold sold american software to british teenagers, and for twelve years that was the entire business. geoff and anne brown started it in birmingham in 1984...
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1996-03-31
eWorld (1994 - 1996)
apple's online service from 1994 to 1996. it was the most beautiful of the walled gardens, with a cartoon town interface where the post office was your email...
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1996-03-31
Microsoft Bob (1995 - 1996)
microsoft's 1995 attempt to replace the windows desktop with a cartoon house, where each room was an application and each piece of furniture was a file. it...
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1996-03-15
Fokker (1912 - 1996)
schiphol-oost had been assembling aircraft since 1951, and the netherlands had been building them under the fokker name since 1919. daimler-benz walked away...
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1996-02-22
Zeos International (1981 - 1996)
zeos sold computers out of minneapolis by telephone, on a promise that somebody would pick up at three in the morning. fortune called it the fastest growing...
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1996-02-05
Conner Peripherals (1985 - 1996)
one hundred and thirteen million dollars of sales in the first year, which was a record for a manufacturing startup in the united states, and 1.337 billion by...
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1996-01-17
NexGen (1986 - 1996)
thampy thomas took money from compaq and kleiner perkins in 1986 to build an x86 processor without asking intel for a license, and spent eight years doing it....
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1996-01-16
Kaleida Labs (1991 - 1996)
an apple-ibm joint venture built to define the multimedia programming language of the cd-rom era. by the time kaleida shipped scriptx in late 1994, java and...
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1996-01-01
Sega 32X (1994 - 1996)
sega 32x was a $159 cartridge-shaped add-on that bolted on top of the sega genesis. sega launched it in north america on november 21 1994, codenamed project...
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1996-01-01
Sega CD (1991 - 1996)
sega cd was the cd-rom add-on for the genesis. sega launched it in japan in december 1991 and in north america in october 1992 at $299. you stacked it under...
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1996-01-01
Trumpet Winsock (1994 - 1996)
peter tattam wrote trumpet winsock at the university of tasmania and released version 1.0a in 1994 as shareware. for two years it was the cheapest way to put a...
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1996-01-01
Stacker (1990 - 1996)
stac electronics released stacker in 1990 and ran the dos disk compression market for the next four years. microsoft copied the design for ms-dos 6.0...
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1996-01-01
Sega CDX (1994 - 1996)
sega cdx was a combined genesis and sega cd console that also worked as a portable audio cd player. north america launch was april 1994 at $399.95, about $100...
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1996-01-01
Technōs Japan (1981 - 1996)
technos japan was three data east employees in a one room apartment in 1981 who ended up making double dragon, the game every beat em up after it copied. the...
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1996-01-01
Telecom Gold (1982 - 1996)
british telecom licensed dialcom's software, ran it on prime minicomputers under a modified primos, and sold electronic mail to british business from 1982 as...
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1996-01-01
Event Horizons BBS (1983 - 1996)
jim maxey started event horizons as a hobby in lake oswego, oregon in late 1983, and by 1993 it was grossing more than 3.2 million dollars a year on dial-up...
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1996-01-01
AMosaic (1993 - 1996)
version 1.0 went out on 25 december 1993, written by three university programmers who all happened to share a first name. it was the first way an amiga owner...
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1996-01-01
MacWeb (1994 - 1996)
one megabyte of free ram was enough to browse the web in 1994, and macweb was how a lot of mac owners found that out. einet, a research outfit in austin, gave...
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1996-01-01
Digital Pictures (1991 - 1996)
a vhs deck with a controller port was the original idea. hasbro paid for it, then killed it, and the people who had built the software bought it back and put...
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1996-01-01
FTL Games (1982 - 1996)
forty thousand copies in the first year, and doug bell's own estimate that more than half of everyone who owned an atari st eventually bought it. dungeon...
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1996-01-01
Capstone Software (1984 - 1996)
the pinnacle of entertainment was printed under a triangle on every box, which was either a joke nobody at the company got or one they all did. capstone sold...
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1996-01-01
Meiko Scientific (1985 - 1996)
nine weeks is how long it took, according to the company's own telling, to go from six resignation letters at inmos to a working parallel machine on a show...
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1996-01-01
CitySpace (1993 - 1996)
at siggraph 1993 an educator named zane vella switched on a 3d world that had nothing in it and let children fill it. cityspace ran for three years out of...
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1996-01-01
Minuet (1994 - 1996)
384 kilobytes of memory and a 4.77 megahertz processor was the design target, because that is what the machines in a university computer lab actually were in...
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1995-12-31
Atari Lynx (1989 - 1996)
the atari lynx was the first color handheld console. amiga veterans rj mical and dave needle designed it in 1987 at epyx, who licensed manufacturing and...
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1995-12-31
5.25" Floppy Disk (1976 - 1995)
the bigger and genuinely floppy older sibling. it was made of soft plastic, it bent if you held it wrong, and it held 360 kb if you were lucky. by the time i...
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1995-12-31
DeluxePaint (1985 - 1995)
deluxepaint was the amiga's paint program first and everything else's paint program after. dan silva wrote it at electronic arts. version one shipped in...
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1995-12-31
XTreeGold (1985 - 1995)
xtree shipped at the west coast computer faire on 1 april 1985 from a small company called executive systems. the dos file manager grew into xtreegold by the...
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1995-12-31
Microsoft Dangerous Creatures (1994 - 1995)
dangerous creatures was one of the first single-subject reference cd-roms microsoft home shipped in the wake of encarta. it came out in august 1994 for windows...
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1995-12-31
WAIS (1990 - 1995)
wais was a search system for the internet before the internet had one, built at thinking machines in 1990 with apple and dow jones paying for part of it. you...
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1995-12-31
Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X (1992 - 1995)
adam richter put a whole linux system on a compact disc in berkeley in 1992 and made it boot without being installed first, which nobody had done. the company...
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1995-12-01
Apple PowerCD (1993 - 1995)
the powercd was apple's first consumer product you could use without a mac next to it. inside it was a rebadged philips cdf-100, the same portable cd-rom drive...
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1995-12-01
Convex Computer (1982 - 1995)
richardson, texas is where the affordable supercomputer got built. bob paluck and steve wallach started convex in 1982 and sold vector machines to sites that...
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1995-11-22
Delrina (1988 - 1995)
415 million dollars in symantec stock closed on 22 november 1995 and ended a company that was seven years old. delrina was started in toronto in 1988 by four...
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1995-11-10
Carolco Pictures (1976 - 1995)
10 november 1995 is the chapter 11 filing, and the pirate film everybody blames opened on 22 december, six weeks after the studio was already in court. two...
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1995-11-01
Quantum Link (1985 - 1995)
q-link was the dial-up service for commodore 64 owners that started in 1985 and turned into aol four years later. quantum computer services renamed itself...
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1995-09-30
WinG (1994 - 1995)
microsoft spent 1994 trying to prove that windows was not the place games went to die, and the argument it made was a small library written by one engineer who...
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1995-09-01
Sega Visions (1990 - 1995)
sega's own magazine in north america. genesis covers, game gear ads, eventually saturn previews. ran from june 1990 to september 1995, 25 issues. it was the...
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1995-09-01
Apple A/UX (1988 - 1995)
a/ux was apple's own at&t unix for the 68k macintosh, system v point 2 point 2 with bsd networking grafted on top of a regular mac toolbox. version 1.0 shipped...
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1995-08-09
Symbolics (1980 - 1995)
the mit ai lab put out two companies in 1980 to build computers that ran lisp all the way down to the microcode, and symbolics got most of the hackers and most...
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1995-08-01
Supra Corporation (1981 - 1995)
three hundred and ninety-nine dollars in january 1992 is the number that matters here. that was the price of the suprafaxmodem 14400, undercutting machines...
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1995-04-30
NSFNET (1985 - 1995)
the national science foundation paid for the main road of the american internet and wrote a rule on it saying research and education only, no business. the...
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1995-04-10
ViolaWWW (1992 - 1995)
pei-yuan wei read a hypercard manual in 1989 and rebuilt the idea on the unix workstations he had access to at berkeley. by march 1992 his viola toolkit had a...
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1995-04-02
tkWWW (1992 - 1995)
joseph wang put a very buggy browser on an mit ftp server on 25 july 1992 and told people to be careful with it. tkwww was written in tcl and tk, which meant...
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1995-04-01
Amiga World (1985 - 1995)
april 1995 was the last issue, eleven volumes on from a premiere that idg shipped in the autumn of 1985 before anyone could actually buy the computer it was...
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1995-03-24
Cray Computer Corporation (1989 - 1995)
seymour cray had already walked out of one company to keep building the machine he wanted, and in 1989 he did it again. cray research handed the colorado...
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1995-03-01
Pyramid Technology (1981 - 1995)
berkeley unix or at&t unix was a real commercial question in the mid 1980s and buying the wrong one could cost you your software. pyramid's answer was to ship...
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1995-02-26
Barings Bank (1762 - 1995)
account 88888 was opened in singapore as a place to park settlement errors and used instead to bury losses that eventually reached £827 million. the kobe...
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1995-02-01
Macintosh TV (1993 - 1995)
the macintosh tv was apple's one and only black all-in-one mac. inside the case sat what amounted to a performa 520 with a built-in cable-ready tv tuner...
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1995-02-01
Aktueller Software Markt (1986 - 1995)
aktueller software markt was a german computer magazine that ran from march 1986 to february 1995. it began as a journal about software in general and ended as...
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1995-02-01
Mark Williams Company (1977 - 1995)
robert swartz announced the end on usenet on 1 february 1995, in the newsgroup his own customers read. the product was coherent, a unix written from scratch...
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1995-01-01
Line Mode Browser (1991 - 1995)
berners-lee's own browser only ran on a next machine, of which there were a few thousand on earth, so the web needed a client that would run on anything with a...
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1995-01-01
World Wide Web Wanderer (1993 - 1995)
the wanderer was a perl script matthew gray ran at mit to answer one question, which was how big the web actually is. it walked outward from a starting point...
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1995-01-01
MILNET (1983 - 1995)
in 1983 the pentagon took its own traffic off the arpanet and put it on a separate network built from the same hardware with no civilian hosts on it. mail...
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1995-01-01
Advanced Network and Services (1990 - 1995)
the national science foundation paid for a backbone that was not allowed to carry business traffic. the answer its operators found in 1990 was to build a...
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1995-01-01
Acorn Archimedes (1987 - 1995)
june 1987, cambridge: a british company shipped the first reduced-instruction-set personal computer anyone could actually buy, running a processor it had...
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1995-01-01
Kendall Square Research (1986 - 1995)
william koch won the america's cup in 1992 and put sixty-five million dollars into a supercomputer company in cambridge. kendall square research had a...
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1995-01-01
Apple Interactive Television Box (1994 - 1995)
about 2,500 of these went into homes around ipswich for a british telecom video-on-demand trial, and that is as close as apple ever got to selling a television...
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1995-01-01
Turbo Pascal (1983 - 1995)
forty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents, at a time when a compiler cost several hundred and came in a box you needed both hands for. anders hejlsberg wrote...
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1995-01-01
Absolute Entertainment (1986 - 1995)
the name was picked so the company would sit above activision in a distributor's catalog, which is exactly the trick activision had pulled on atari a decade...
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1995-01-01
Cotation Assistée en Continu (1986 - 1995)
the cac in cac 40 is a dead computer. cotation assistee en continu was the trading system the paris bourse ran from 1986, bought as a license from the toronto...
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1995
Prológica (1976 - 1995)
brazil spent the eighties under a law that kept foreign computers out, so brazilian companies built their own versions of machines the rest of the world could...
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1994-12-31
TurboGrafx-16 (1987 - 1994)
the pc engine launched in japan on october 30 1987 and was the first sixteen-bit-class home console to ship. as turbografx-16 in north america from august 1989...
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1994-12-31
Softlanding Linux System (1992 - 1994)
peter macdonald put a working linux system on a stack of floppy disks in may 1992, x window system included, and called it a soft landing for people bailing...
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1994-12-21
Eclipse Comics (1977 - 1994)
the russian river came over its banks on 14 february 1986 and took about two hundred thousand dollars of inventory out of a comics publisher in guerneville,...
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1994-12-01
Thalion Software (1988 - 1994)
thalion was eleven people in gütersloh who came out of the atari st demo scene and decided to make the games they had been writing effects for. between october...
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1994-12-01
Inmos (1978 - 1994)
£211 million of british government money went into a semiconductor company set up to give the country a chip industry it did not otherwise have. what it...
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1994-11-30
KnowledgeWare (1979 - 1994)
a hall of fame quarterback ran this one. fran tarkenton merged his atlanta software business into james martin's database design inc in the mid eighties, kept...
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1994-10-31
JUNET (1984 - 1994)
japan's academic internet started in october 1984 as machines phoning each other at 9600 bits per second and passing mail along with uucp. no backbone, no...
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1994-10-20
EARN (1983 - 1994)
earn was the european half of bitnet, running ibm mainframe protocols over leased telephone circuits that ibm paid for at the start. through most of the...
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1994-10-01
Metaphor Computer Systems (1982 - 1994)
two of xerox parc's senior people walked out in 1982 and built the machine xerox would not sell properly. the metaphor workstation shipped in september 1984...
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1994-10-01
SynOptics (1985 - 1994)
revenue went from 1.8 million dollars in 1986 to 700 million in 1993, which is what happens when you sell the one thing every office building is about to need....
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1994-09-01
Compute! (1979 - 1994)
168 issues, and the part everybody remembers is the homework. a game arrived as pages of numbers, you entered them by hand, and a checksum utility called the...
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1994-08-31
Aldus Corporation (1984 - 1994)
aldus was the seattle company paul brainerd founded in february 1984 to ship pagemaker. brainerd coined the phrase 'desktop publishing' to describe what his...
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1994-08-17
Thinking Machines Corporation (1983 - 1994)
danny hillis wanted a computer built from sixty-five thousand tiny processors instead of one large fast one, and thinking machines turned that thesis into a...
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1994-08-03
Northgate Computer Systems (1987 - 1994)
northgate sold beige towers by post out of eden prairie, minnesota, and the only part of it anybody still argues about is the keyboard. the omnikey used alps...
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1994-08-01
ResEdit (1984 - 1994)
resedit was apple's graphical editor for the classic mac resource fork. it shipped from around 1984 as a developer tool and got adopted by power users who...
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1994-08-01
Medical News Network (1993 - 1994)
the drug companies did not buy the sponsorships, and that was the whole business, so there was nothing left to argue about. whittle communications had spent...
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1994-08-01
Orchid Technology (1982 - 1994)
lan is the vietnamese word for orchid, which is where the company name came from, and the first product was a one megabit local network card for the ibm pc in...
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1994-07-01
GO Corporation (1987 - 1994)
go corporation spent seven years and $75 million building penpoint, a pen driven operating system for tablet computers, at a point when nobody had worked out...
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1994-06-17
National Videotex Network (1992 - 1994)
u.s. videotel launched nvn in 1992 to compete with compuserve and genie, which was late by any reading of that market. it sold news and research databases over...
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1994-06-03
Alex (1988 - 1994)
alex was bell canada's minitel, launched in montreal at the end of 1988 with a northern telecom terminal you rented by the month and a 1200 bit/s modem inside...
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1994-06-01
PC Tools (1985 - 1994)
pc tools was the other dos utility canon. for ten years it sat on every power user's hard drive next to norton, sometimes instead of it, and the install base...
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1994-06-01
T/Maker (1983 - 1994)
deluxe corporation printed bank checks, and in june 1994 it paid around $20 million for a mountain view software company doing $15 million a year. what it was...
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1994-06-01
Votrax (1971 - 1994)
a screw manufacturer in detroit owned the first cheap speech chip. federal screw works licensed richard gagnon's synthesizer design in 1970 and ran it as a...
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1994-06-01
Central Point Software (1980 - 1994)
michael burmeister-brown named the company after the oregon town he started it in, and for its first years it sold one thing: a program that copied floppy...
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1994-04-29
Commodore International (1976 - 1994)
commodore was jack tramiel's typewriter and calculator company that pivoted into home computers in 1977 with the pet, then shipped the commodore 64 in 1982 and...
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1994-04-29
Amiga CD32 (1993 - 1994)
a warehouse in the philippines is where most of this story ends. commodore built up cd32 inventory there for an american launch that a federal judge blocked,...
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1994-04-25
Erwise (1992 - 1994)
erwise was the first web browser anybody outside a research group could run with a graphical interface, released on 15 april 1992 by four masters students at...
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1994-04-16
Cello (1993 - 1994)
every other early browser was written by people who wanted a web. cello was written because a law school had put american case law online and discovered that...
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1994-04-01
Quotron (1960 - 1994)
in 1986 citicorp paid $630 million for the company whose terminals sat on a hundred thousand broker desks, around sixty percent of the market for financial...
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1994-04-01
Commodore 64 (1982 - 1994)
595 dollars in august 1982 for 64 kilobytes and a sound chip nobody else was shipping. commodore owned the fab that made its own silicon, so it could cut the...
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1994-03-31
Toaplan (1979 - 1994)
toaplan made arcade shooters in tokyo for about nine years and went bankrupt on the last day of march 1994. the genre it left behind is the reason bullet hell...
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1994-02-01
Watcom (1981 - 1994)
the computing center at the university of waterloo spent the 1960s and 70s writing teaching compilers, and in 1981 a professor and some of his former students...
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1994-01-01
MacDraw (1984 - 1994)
macdraw was the vector half of the original macintosh bundle, mark cutter shipped it alongside macpaint on january 24 1984. cutter had already built lisadraw...
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1994-01-01
Prestel (1979 - 1994)
prestel was the british post office's videotex service. it launched in september 1979 as the first public online information service in the world, running at...
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1994-01-01
WriteNow (1985 - 1994)
writenow was written in assembly by two seattle programmers, sold by t/maker, and one of the fastest mac word processors of its decade. the assembly that made...
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1994-01-01
WorldWideWeb (Nexus) (1990 - 1994)
worldwideweb was the first web browser, written by tim berners-lee at cern in late 1990 on a next cube, and for a while it was the only one that existed. it...
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1994-01-01
Scream Tracker (1990 - 1994)
sami tammilehto, who signed his work psi and helped found the finnish demogroup future crew, wrote a music tracker for dos and gave it away. version 2.2 in...
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1994-01-01
MacWWW (1992 - 1994)
robert cailliau wrote a web browser for the macintosh at cern in 1992, with nicola pellow joining later from the line mode browser. it was the first browser...
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1994-01-01
JumpStation (1993 - 1994)
jonathon fletcher was a systems administrator at the university of stirling in scotland when he built jumpstation, which started indexing on 12 december 1993...
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1994-01-01
Timeworks Publisher (1987 - 1994)
a cambridge software house cloned ventura publisher, cut the price by an order of magnitude and made it run on a machine with no hard drive, which is the...
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1994-01-01
MIDnet (1987 - 1994)
eight campuses sharing fifty six kilobits per second, and in september 1987 that became the first of the nsf regional backbones to run properly end to end....
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1994-01-01
Spinnaker Software (1982 - 1994)
april 1982, cambridge massachusetts. bill bowman and c. david seuss worked out that the people buying home computers for their children did not read computer...
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1994-01-01
Media Vision (1990 - 1994)
paul jain ran a company whose sound card was better than the one that won. the pro audiospectrum 16 shipped ahead of the sound blaster 16 and sounded better...
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1994-01-01
Poqet PC (1989 - 1994)
fujitsu bought poqet computer in 1992 and had production stopped by 1994, which is the least interesting thing about a machine that ran ms-dos on two aa...
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1994-01-01
BBC Micro (1981 - 1994)
in april 1981 a broadcaster awarded a computer contract to a cambridge company that had turned an unfinished design into a working prototype in four days to...
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1994-01-01
LJN (1967 - 1994)
seventy million dollars of licensed toys in 1982, most of it e.t. merchandise and a brooke shields doll. by 1987 the same licensing habit was pointed at the...
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1994-01-01
Cannon Films (1967 - 1994)
in 1986 the company released forty-three films, more than any studio in hollywood, and owned a british cinema chain it had bought that april for £175 million....
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1994-01-01
Canon FD Lens Mount (1971 - 1994)
in march 1987 canon shipped a camera that would not take a single lens it had sold in the previous sixteen years. the fd mount was not failing and it was not...
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1994
Bernoulli Box (1982 - 1994)
iomega's first product was a floppy disk that flew. spin a flexible platter fast enough next to a fixed plate and the airflow pulls it up toward the head,...
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1993-12-31
Atari Portfolio (1989 - 1993)
atari shipped the portfolio in june 1989 at $399.95: the first palmtop pc that ran dos and the first machine most people saw a child use on screen, when john...
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1993-12-01
Rabbit (1992 - 1993)
rabbit was a phone you could carry but could not be reached on. hutchison put twelve thousand cordless base stations across britain, marked each one with a...
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1993-12-01
Ferranti (1885 - 1993)
the deptford power station opened in 1890 to a design by a man of twenty six, the first station built to push high voltage alternating current across a whole...
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1993-07-01
NEARnet (1988 - 1993)
darpa announced it was going to take the arpanet apart, so a group of boston universities built their own regional network rather than wait to be unplugged....
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1993-07-01
Company of Science and Art (1990 - 1993)
providence, rhode island, 1990. four people started a company there and shipped one of the first cross-platform digital video tools, which nobody remembers....
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1993-06-14
Unix System Laboratories (1989 - 1993)
novell finished buying it on 14 june 1993 for around $335 million in stock, and the thing it had bought was already damaged by its own lawsuit. usl was at&t...
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1993-05-01
Compunet (1984 - 1993)
compunet was a british dial-up service for the commodore 64, reached through a boxy 1200/75 modem that carried the client software in its own rom. you paid by...
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1993-03-11
TAURUS (1990 - 1993)
the london stock exchange board met on 11 march 1993 and accepted its chief executive's recommendation to cancel taurus. peter rawlins resigned the same day....
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1993-03-01
Tandon Corporation (1975 - 1993)
forty tracks instead of thirty-five is what the tm100 had over shugart's sa-400, and it was enough to put tandon inside the ibm pc as the only floppy supplier...
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1993-02-23
Microsoft QuickC (1987 - 1993)
borland shipped turbo c in 1987 with the first integrated development environment for c on the pc, at 99 dollars and 95 cents, and microsoft answered that...
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1993-01-01
Lotus Magellan (1989 - 1993)
a dos desktop search and file viewer that bill gross and larry gross built and sold to lotus development. released in april 1989 at a list price of $195. the...
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1993-01-01
Epyx (1978 - 1993)
epyx began in 1978 as automated simulations, two people selling dungeon crawls in ziploc bags, and by 1984 it was the studio that made the commodore 64 look...
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1993-01-01
Elwro (1959 - 1993)
a state electronics works in wrocław that built the first computer made in poland and then kept building them for thirty years, mainframes for institutions and...
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1993-01-01
MSX (1983 - 1993)
kazuhiko nishi wanted a vhs for home computers, one hardware specification that every manufacturer could build against so software would run everywhere. two...
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1993-01-01
HD-MAC (1986 - 1993)
barcelona, summer 1992: about seven hundred televisions in public halls showed the olympics in 1,152 visible lines, and that was very close to the whole...
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1993-01-01
Electronika BK (1985 - 1993)
600 roubles at a time when the average monthly wage was about 150, so the machine cost four months of work. what you got for it was a pdp-11 in a home case,...
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1993-01-01
Signetics (1961 - 1993)
around a billion 555 timers a year still come off production lines somewhere in the world, which is a strange afterlife for a company you have not been able to...
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1993-01-01
Agat (1984 - 1993)
3,900 roubles, about twenty times a monthly wage, for a machine that was an apple II underneath and not reliably compatible with one on the surface. the soviet...
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1993-01-01
Electra (1983 - 1993)
zenith worked out in 1992 that its 1993 television sets could not practically carry both a teletext decoder and a closed captioning decoder, and that decision...
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1993-01-01
Supercomputer Systems, Inc. (1988 - 1993)
more than three hundred people in eau claire, wisconsin spent five years building a machine that no customer ever received. steve chen had designed the cray...
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1993-01-01
Elektronika BK (1985 - 1993)
600 to 650 roubles at a time when the average soviet monthly wage was about 150. that was the price of the elektronika bk, and people bought it anyway....
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1992-12-31
Dinamic Software (1984 - 1992)
dinamic was three brothers in madrid who turned a bedroom operation into the biggest name in spanish software, and for most of the 1980s spain had a games...
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1992-12-31
ORACLE (1975 - 1992)
oracle was the teletext service on itv and channel 4, the commercial half of the text pages hiding behind british television, and it ran from the middle of the...
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1992-12-31
Norsk Data (1967 - 1992)
three engineers started building minicomputers in oslo in august 1967. by 1987 norsk data was the second most valuable company on the oslo exchange behind...
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1992-12-01
WordStar (1979 - 1992)
wordstar was the first word processor to define what writing on a personal computer felt like. micropro shipped it in june 1979 on cp/m and ported it to dos in...
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1992-11-01
Beagle Bros (1980 - 1992)
the logo was lifted off a smith bros cough drop box and the staff directory listed employees named elsie dee and flo chart. bert kersey started it out of his...
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1992-07-22
Prime Computer, Inc. (1972 - 1992)
334 on the fortune 500 in 1988, and four years later there was no computer company left. prime built minicomputers in natick that ran an operating system...
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1992-07-01
Nibble (1980 - 1992)
mike harvey left his job at a company called inforex at the end of 1979 and had the first issue of nibble on paper inside about ninety days, out of lincoln,...
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1992-06-01
Kaypro (1982 - 1992)
a company that had been making digital voltmeters since 1952 decided in 1982 to sell a computer, packed it in an aluminum case you could carry by the handle,...
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1992-05-27
Control Data Corporation (1957 - 1992)
sixty thousand people worked here in 1981 and the machines had been the fastest in the world for most of the previous decade. seymour cray designed the 6600...
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1992-04-06
Windows Reversi (1985 - 1992)
the only game in windows 1.0, written in 1984 by a member of the windows team as a test of whether anyone could build an application for the thing at all. it...
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1992-01-01
Lotus Agenda (1988 - 1992)
mitch kapor designed lotus agenda after walking away from lotus 1-2-3, the program shipped in may 1988 as a dos personal information manager built around a...
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1992-01-01
Mirrorsoft (1983 - 1992)
mirrorsoft was a newspaper company's games division, which sounds harmless until you remember whose newspaper. it published tetris across europe on a license...
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1992-01-01
Magnetic Scrolls (1984 - 1992)
magnetic scrolls was the only british studio anyone put next to infocom, and for about six years the comparison was not flattery. it wrote each game once and...
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1992-01-01
Microdigital Eletrônica (1981 - 1992)
two brothers in são paulo spent eleven years building british computers that could not legally be imported into brazil. the tk line followed sinclair machine...
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1992-01-01
SuperCalc (1980 - 1992)
sorcim wrote supercalc in 1980 because adam osborne wanted a spreadsheet for his portable computer and could not get the rights to visicalc. it shipped free in...
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1992-01-01
SAM Coupé (1989 - 1992)
swansea, december 1989. two engineers who had left sinclair research built the machine the zx spectrum was supposed to grow into, with a spectrum compatibility...
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1992-01-01
New England Digital (1976 - 1992)
cheap hardware killed it, not a competitor. new england digital sold the synclavier out of white river junction, vermont, for sums that ran past two hundred...
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1992-01-01
AdLib (1987 - 1992)
a music professor at université laval built the first sound card the pc industry ever agreed on. from 1987 an adlib card was what a game box meant when it said...
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1992-01-01
ZX Spectrum (1982 - 1992)
cambridge, 1982. clive sinclair's small team built a color home computer cheap enough that british parents would actually buy one, £125 for the 16K model with...
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1992-01-01
Maťo (1989 - 1992)
a state agricultural enterprise in závadka nad hronom put an eight bit computer into serial production in august 1989, because one of the people working there...
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1992-01-01
Alliant Computer Systems (1982 - 1992)
the attack of the killer micros was a phrase going round the supercomputing conferences at the turn of the 1990s, and alliant is one of the companies it was...
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1992
Opera Soft (1986 - 1992)
madrid, 1986. five people walked out of indescomp and took an office near the ópera district because the rent beat the one they had looked at in lavapiés,...
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1991-12-31
Distinctive Software (1982 - 1991)
distinctive software was a work-for-hire studio in burnaby, british columbia, started in 1982 by two teenagers who had just sold their first game. for most of...
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1991-12-31
Palace Software (1984 - 1991)
palace software was a film company's games label. palace pictures distributed video in london and held the uk rights to the evil dead, so the first game was...
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1991-12-04
Pan Am (1927 - 1991)
the worldport at jfk had a roof that reached out over the aircraft so nobody walked to the door in the rain, and delta owned it by the end of 1991. united had...
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1991-12-01
Floating Point Systems (1970 - 1991)
the sun ultra enterprise 10000, the big server of the dot com years, started life in a beaverton warehouse full of array processors. norm winningstad left...
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1991-10-31
Micronet 800 (1983 - 1991)
prestel was british telecom's videotex system, pages of text you called up on a screen over the phone. micronet 800 was the part of it built for people who...
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1991-10-31
CSNET (1981 - 1991)
getting on arpanet needed a defense research contract, and most computer science departments in america did not have one. csnet was the answer for everybody...
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1991-10-30
Pansophic Systems (1969 - 1991)
four employees and $150,000 borrowed from an uncle, above a storefront in oak brook illinois in 1969, at a moment when selling software as a product on its own...
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1991-10-29
dBASE (Ashton-Tate) (1980 - 1991)
dbase was the database for the cp/m and ms-dos micros. wayne ratliff wrote it as vulcan at jpl in 1978. ashton-tate licensed it in 1980, rebranded it as dbase...
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1991-10-14
Game & Watch (1980 - 1991)
a bullet train in the late seventies, and a nintendo engineer watching a bored businessman kill time with an lcd calculator. gunpei yokoi built a toy out of...
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1991-10-01
Phonepoint (1989 - 1991)
phonepoint was the first of britain's four telepoint services and the worst performing of them. a consortium led by stc and british telecom put 3,300 base...
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1991-10-01
Digital Research (1974 - 1991)
pacific grove, california, 1974. a professor writes an operating system for a hobby machine and accidentally sets the standard for every 8-bit microcomputer...
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1991-09-30
Cinemaware (1986 - 1991)
cinemaware was a small studio that built "interactive movie" games for the amiga starting in 1986. defender of the crown shipped at launch and is the title...
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1991-09-28
Ashton-Tate (1980 - 1991)
ashton-tate was the database company in the early personal computer era, holding around 70 percent of the PC database market in the mid-1980s and sitting...
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1991-09-01
PrairieTek (1986 - 1991)
$18 million is what conner peripherals and alps electric paid in 1992 for the patents of a company that had only ever raised $14 million. prairietek built the...
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1991-06-01
Paperback Software (1983 - 1991)
on 28 june 1990 a federal judge in boston held that the menu structure of lotus 1-2-3 was protected expression, and adam osborne's company was the one standing...
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1991-06-01
Level 9 Computing (1981 - 1991)
high wycombe first, then somewhere in the west country, is where three brothers wrote the text adventures britain measured against infocom. the trick was...
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1991-04-30
Trabant (1957 - 1991)
3.7 million of them came out of zwickau between 1957 and 1991, and for most of that run the car barely changed at all. a 601 ordered in the late seventies...
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1991-04-30
Interflug (1958 - 1991)
on 30 april 1991 a tupolev tu-134 flew vienna to berlin-schönefeld, and east germany's airline was finished. lufthansa had offered to buy all of interflug in...
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1991-04-01
CRL Group (1982 - 1991)
the british board of film classification had never classified a video game until crl sent it dracula in 1986, and the board came back with a 15 certificate....
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1991-02-01
Ticketron (1965 - 1991)
a mainframe in a hotel basement and a terminal in a record shop meant you could buy one named seat in a stadium two states away, and the seat could not be sold...
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1991-01-18
Eastern Air Lines (1926 - 1991)
frank lorenzo's texas air corporation bought eastern in february 1986 and began moving pieces of it into other companies he controlled. the machinists walked...
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1991-01-01
Xenix (1980 - 1991)
microsoft licensed unix from at&t in 1978, could not use the name, and called its version xenix. it never sold a copy to a person. it sold licenses to hardware...
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1991-01-01
Family Computer Network System (1988 - 1991)
a modem peripheral for the japanese famicom, released in september 1988 after hiroshi yamauchi told masayuki uemura to build a stock trading service with...
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1991-01-01
Rodime (1979 - 1991)
glenrothes in fife, 1983: a company almost nobody outside the trade can name shipped the first hard disk built to the size of a 3.5 inch floppy, which is the...
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1991-01-01
Hewson Consultants (1980 - 1991)
a german distributor booked a london hotel suite in 1991 to tell andrew hewson that he could not pay his bills and was going under. that one meeting finished a...
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1991-01-01
Personal Software Services (1981 - 1991)
to launch the nuclear weapons in theatre europe you had to put down the joystick and pick up a telephone. a number printed with the game played you a recording...
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1991-01-01
Anadol (1966 - 1991)
fiberglass was the trick. nobody in turkey could justify the press tooling for a steel body in 1966, so otosan licensed a design from reliant in england and...
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1990-12-31
Quicksilva (1980 - 1990)
quicksilva was a mail order operation in southampton that turned into one of the largest software publishers in britain before there was really an industry to...
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1990-12-31
Power Glove (1989 - 1990)
the power glove was mattel's licensed nes controller that read how far your fingers were bent and where your hand was sitting in the room, out from october...
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1990-11-01
Squarial (1990 - 1990)
a flat plate the size of a placemat, bolted to the wall where a dish would have gone. british satellite broadcasting built an entire advertising campaign...
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1990-10-01
Nixdorf Computer AG (1952 - 1990)
heinz nixdorf started a lab in essen in 1952 with borrowed money and built it into the fourth largest computer company in europe on one idea, which was that a...
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1990-08-01
Peter Norton Computing (1982 - 1990)
thirty thousand dollars and one ibm pc in 1982. a programmer in santa monica deleted a file he needed, worked out that dos had not really erased it, and sold...
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1990-07-01
VEB Robotron (1969 - 1990)
east germany's largest electronics combine, sixty eight thousand people in dresden and twenty other towns, building mainframes that were reimplementations of...
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1990-06-01
Antic (1982 - 1990)
jim capparell quit a nasa programming job on 15 january 1982 to start a magazine about the home computer he happened to own, and had the first issue in...
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1990-03-27
Multiflow Computer (1984 - 1990)
trace scheduling was a compiler technique before it was a company. josh fisher worked it out at yale in 1978, then took two of his people to connecticut in...
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1990-02-28
ARPANET (1969 - 1990)
arpa funded a packet-switched network in 1969 to find out whether the idea worked at all, and the first message across it was two letters long before the...
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1990-02-13
Drexel Burnham Lambert (1935 - 1990)
michael milken ran the high yield desk out of beverly hills, three time zones from the head office, and in 1986 the firm he worked for earned more money than...
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1990-02-01
Silicon Beach Software (1984 - 1990)
silicon beach software was the first serious third-party developer on the macintosh, started in san diego in 1984 by charlie jackson and his wife hallie, in...
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1990-01-01
CD Video (1987 - 1990)
cd video was philips putting a laserdisc and a compact disc on the same 12 cm platter and coloring it gold so you could tell it apart on the rack. the inner...
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1990-01-01
Boston CitiNet (1982 - 1990)
applied videotex systems ran a local online service out of belmont, massachusetts that cost nothing to read and made its money from advertisers. it started in...
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1990-01-01
Multiplan (1982 - 1990)
microsoft shipped multiplan in august 1982, before there was a windows and before there was an excel, and ported it onto something like a hundred different...
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1990-01-01
Photon Paint (1987 - 1990)
the seventeen year old who wrote it went on to direct paranormal activity. oren peli was working at a small israeli house called bazbosoft when he and two...
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1990-01-01
VPL Research (1984 - 1990)
jaron lanier founded this in 1984 and spent six years building the first commercial virtual reality hardware anyone could actually buy, assuming they had the...
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1990-01-01
MiniScribe (1980 - 1990)
twenty-six thousand bricks were weighed, packed into hard disk cartons and shipped to singapore so that a warehouse full of nothing would count as inventory on...
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1990-01-01
Teletype Corporation (1928 - 1990)
in december 1928 a printing telegraph company took the name teletype, and eighteen months later at&t bought it for thirty million dollars in stock. for the...
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1990-01-01
Priam Corporation (1978 - 1990)
october 1989 is when the chapter 11 filing went in, and the year that followed was spent selling the company off in pieces rather than saving it. priam had...
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1990-01-01
Amstrad CPC (1984 - 1990)
alan sugar looked at the home computer market in 1984 and decided the problem was not the machine, it was the wiring. the CPC464 arrived that june with its...
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1990-01-01
KC 85 (1984 - 1990)
in 1985 two unrelated east german computers, from two different factories, were both renamed on the same grounds. the mühlhausen machine had shipped a year...
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1990-01-01
Pravetz (1980 - 1990)
a town of a few thousand people in the balkan foothills, an hour north of sofia, ended up building more personal computers than anywhere else in the eastern...
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1990-01-01
Distributed Language Translation (1985 - 1990)
in the spring of 1979 a dutch software engineer heard a bbc world service item about balzac on his car radio and thought of esperanto as the pivot between...
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1990-01-01
Supertek Computers (1985 - 1990)
mike fung left hewlett-packard in 1985 to build a cray you could plug into a wall socket. the supertek s-1 ran cray x-mp code and fit in a room with no...
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1990-01-01
Intellivision (1979 - 1990)
mattel electronics lost 394 million dollars in 1983 and was sold off for 20 million on 4 february 1984, which killed the division but not the console. a group...