The Oddities of Area Codes
Area codes in the US seem pretty random. ZIP codes are organized somewhat by region, but area codes just seem to be made up of three arbitrary numbers. This is true nowadays, but there...
Category: Tech History
Recollections of vintage computers and software
How Microsoft Saved Apple
Coke versus Pepsi. Ford versus Chevy. Edison versus Tesla. There have been many great rivalries in the modern business world. One of the most iconic is Apple versus Microsoft. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates...
Playing GORILLA.BAS With My Family
One of my favorite old video games was GORILLA.BAS. It was actually a demo that came with MS-DOS. I spent a lot of time knocking around in QBasic, and while I never became an...
Programming in QBasic
Early computers almost always came with BASIC. As the name implies, it was a basic programming language that allowed you to make all kinds of simple programs. Though they didn’t invent BASIC, it was...
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...
A Lovable Lemon: My Performa 6200
It was the spring of 1995. I was 14 years old and a full-fledged computer geek. The family computer was in my bedroom, and while I had to share it with my sister, I...
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 this had not yet permeated mainstream culture....
The First Browser War
The World Wide Web really started to take off in the mid-1990s. If you wanted to use it, you needed a web browser. Early Internet users could make do with simple text-based terminal software,...
The Rise of Microsoft Windows NT
Early versions of Microsoft Windows were pretty primitive by modern standards. Microsoft intended for Windows to be an interim solution. It started out as a graphical interface that ran atop MS-DOS, making DOS easier...
