My Venerable iPhone 4S
I was one of the last people in my clique to get a smart phone. Back in 2011, I still had a little Samsung flip phone. When the iPhone 4S same out, I decided...
Category: Tech History
Recollections of vintage computers and software
A Lovable Lemon: My Performa 6200
It was the spring of 1995. I was 14 years old and a full-fledged computer geek. I had the family computer in my bedroom, and while I had to share it with my sister,...
The Second Browser War
In the 1990s, Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer competed for domination in the so-called “First Browser War”. It took a couple of years, but Microsoft won a complete victory, and by 2002 Internet...
Starting Up Windows 95
Before 1995, operating systems were not something the average person thought about. Sure there were hardcore geeks out there debating the merits of Windows vs OS/2, but the merits of such platforms had not...
The First Browser War
The World Wide Web really started to take off in the mid-1990s, and if you wanted to use it, you needed a web browser. Early Internet users could make do with simple text-based terminal...
The Rise of Microsoft Windows NT
Early versions of Microsoft Windows were pretty primitive by modern standards, but that’s only because Windows was meant to be an interim solution. It started out as a graphical interface that ran atop MS-DOS,...
BeOS: The Mac OS X That Might Have Been
If OS/2 is the Windows that almost was, BeOS is the MacOS that almost was. In the mid 1990s, a former Apple executive named Jean-Louis Gassee left the company to build his own computer...
Early Versions of Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows has been around for 30 years, and it’s still the dominant operating system for desktop PCs. Ever since the release of Windows 95, this venerable OS has dominated the desktop market, (especially...
AOL and Other Online Services
In my early days of computing, I logged on to Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) to download files and participate in forum discussions. The BBSes I logged into were free, but they were hard to...
The Computer Chronicles
Regular readers of this site will know that I’m big into tech history. I was fascinated by computers as a child and a teenager, and I spend a lot of time writing about vintage...
