Category: Tech History

Recollections of vintage computers and software

Microsoft Saved Apple 8

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...

GORILLA.BAS 7

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...

QBasic Screen in Comic Sans 7

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...

iPhone Screen in Vintage Mac style 5

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...

Browser War Risk Map 3

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...

Windows 95 Logo with Clouds 11

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....

Netscape Navigator Loading Screen 4

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,...

Windows Program Manager Vectorized 8

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...