The ware for January 2025 is the Gavilan SC laptop motherboard. The Gavilan laptop is one of the first portable computer designs, announced in 1983, at a 2024-equivalent price of $12,400. However, the company only survived for one year, per Wikipedia:
Owing to a rigorous overhaul of the design of the laptop, the company missed its initial shipment deadline of December 1983, with the first several dozen units shipping instead in April 1984. Early units were fraught with technical issues, prompting more tweaks. Mass production and sales did not commence until June 1984. By this point, a major distributor of the Gavilan computer had filed for bankruptcy and was forced to pulled out of their deal with Gavilan. In late 1984, Gavilan Computer Corporation themselves declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy with cash flow problems. The company ceased operations in 1985, having only shipped a few thousand units of the Gavilan SC.
The number of blue wires on the main board is pretty consistent with “fraught with technical issues, prompting more tweaks”, and the history of the company reads like a botched Kickstarter from 2010, except it happened in 1984.
I was a little surprised at how difficult it was to guess the nature of the ware. I think contestants were reasonably thrown off by the inclusion of the modem. That would be a pretty forward-thinking feature to be designed into a laptop mainboard back in 1984. It’s also puzzling why one would preferentially integrate the modem over say, the RAM/ROM on the mainboard: generally there is some bare minimum memory required for a system to even function, whereas a modem might benefit from modularity for e.g. SKU diversity and/or future-proofing against improvements in modem hardware.
That being said, the company didn’t survive. Perhaps it is due in part to poor integration decisions from the get-go, yet contestants were viewing the ware through the lens of good decision making. Personally, I have found some of the hardest wares to guess to be poorly designed wares, as the final form is a bad fit for the function.
After reading through the comment thread a couple of times, I find it too hard to assign any one person a clear winner. A shout-out to FETguy for the explanation of the crinkly solder mask: I think the SMOBC vs HASL answer is correct – turns out I probably knew the answer to this once upon a time, but I had forgotten it with old age. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a tie to break in the competition – I think none of the guesses got close enough for me to declare a winner, despite all the thoughtful commentary. Thanks to everyone who participated!