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PC hardware brands have come and gone, and the vast majority of the time, they don’t go defunct due to bad products. They die from strategy errors, mismanagement, reputations that curdle, or simply getting swallowed by a bigger fish and never resurfacing. These 5 brands in the PC space are long gone; some of which live on after being rebranded, while others are totally defunct and left behind for good.
In the late 90s, if you were serious about PC gaming, you owned a Voodoo card. 3dfx did more than anyone to popularize consumer 3D acceleration, and its Glide API was the one developers optimized for. It was the brand you’d buy, and they largely invented the graphics card as we know it today.
At the end of 1998, it made a fatal business mistake. 3dfx bought board manufacturer STB systems and went vertical, deciding to build its own branded cards instead of selling chips to the partners who’d been making them (sound familiar?), and that move turned its own ecosystem of vendors into competitors overnight. Meanwhile, Nvidia’s GeForce line and a maturing Direct3D ate away at Glide’s advantages. Nvidia would end up buying most of 3dfx’s assets in December 2000, and the company would file for bankruptcy not long after.
Some of its most noteworthy cards include the Voodoo3 3000 and the never-released Voodoo 5 6000, the latter of which has since been recreated by an absolute mad lad on the ModLabs forum.
My ol’ gaming rig still chugs along with the rest of my computing arsenal
Commodore sold the Commodore 64, frequently cited as the best-selling single computer model ever made, and followed it with the Amiga, a machine that was genuinely years ahead on graphics and multimedia. This is a little before my time, but if you talk to PC enthusiasts who were lucky enough to have hands-on with one of these at the time, they won’t be able to stop talking about it.
Commodore should’ve been untouchable with the amount of success they saw from both machines, but instead, they were chronically mismanaged and failed to evolve into the 90s. By 1994 the company was bankrupt, and the brand has spent the three decades since bouncing between owners who occasionally slap the name on something to cash in on nostalgia.
Compaq didn’t flame out the way that Commodore did. In fact, it built its reputation by being incredibly crafty. They legally reverse-engineered an IBM-comptaible BIOS, used business savvy to ship PCs at a very high rate, and as a result, beat IBM at its own game for a period of time. Some of the first machines I used as a kid were branded Compaq, though that was after their acquisition.
HP absorbed Compaq in a contentious 2002 merger, kept it alive as a budget sub-brand for years, and then quietly retired it. It was a shell of what it was after the merger, unfortunately.
Steve Jobs founded NeXT in 1985 right after being forced out of Apple, and the company is the clearest proof on this list that commercial failure and lasting influence are two very different things.
The NeXT Computer was, in a technical sense, years ahead of anything else around it in 1988, but the base price was $6,500. That’s just over $18,000 in today’s USD when adjusted for inflation. While that’s basically what a stick of DDR5 is worth these days, that price put the NeXT Computer well beyond personal computing territory, and it was basically out of reach for anyone besides educators. A rather fun fact is that Tim Berners-Lee built the first web browser and web server on a NeXT machine.
What happened after their hardware division was canned was much more important. Their software was largely a flop in a business sense, but NeXTSTEP, its Unix-based, object-oriented operating system, was so far ahead of the curve that Apple bought NeXT in late 1996 largely to use it as the foundation for a desperately needed new OS. That OS became Mac OS X, and its lineage runs through every Mac, iPhone, and iPad today.
Nothing ever truly dies on the internet and these retro operating systems are live and kicking and ready for you to use.
If you remember the early-2000s Radeon-versus-GeForce wars, you remember ATI as one of the two giants of consumer graphics. AMD bought it in 2006 for roughly $5.4 billion and kept the “ATI Radeon” branding for a few years before phasing the ATI name out entirely around 2010.
It’s the exception on this list, because ATI never truly died or became an unnecessary branding exercise. Many of the engineers that were responsible for ATI Radeon have their fingerprints on AMD Radeon tech. That’s not to say that they’re all still around, but the lineage can be directly traced back to those early ATI cards.
While all of these brands are long gone from public view, a lot of them were either absorbed by a larger company, or live on as the core inspiration for a product. The Voodoo magic lives on in Nvidia’s IP, the Radeon line still carries ATI’s lineage, and NeXT created the OS that became the foundation for what powers macOS today. They also live on in the memory of 90s kids, who definitely had experience with one of them at one point or another.