David L. Farquhar, computer security professional, train hobbyist, and landlord
Marx train set 45225 was an electric train set from Marx from 1951-1953, and possibly into 1954. Arguably the last hurrah for Marx’s tinplate trains, it featured Marx’s #21 tinplate diesels in the Santa Fe Warbonnet livery pulling tin freight cars on high trucks.
One of the indelible memories of owning and using a Commodore 64, at least for me, was the disk drive knocking and rattling loudly as your game loaded. This was the results of deliberately putting errors on the disk to make it difficult to copy. In this blog post, I’ll give you the straight talk on how big of a problem software piracy was on the Commodore C-64, at least in the United States, and what it led to, including the bad, the ugly, and the good. Not that the end justifies the means, but over time it did lead to some good things too.
The Magnavox Odyssey 2 is an overlooked second generation game console, at least in the United States. I was curious how this console sold 2 million units and yet I never saw one and rarely heard about it growing up. In this blog post, I uncover why that is.
When it comes to the question of how many IBM PCs sold, the numbers I hear are all over the place. I’ve heard 3 million, 60 million, and some numbers in between. In this blog post, I’ll uncover the reason there are so many conflicting numbers.
Marx train set 52925 was a plastic postwar train set for the Canadian market, commemorating the Canadian Pacific railroad. It was a five-unit train featuring a 2-4-2 steam locomotive with a tender pulling two freight cars and a caboose.
Disk copiers were long a taboo subject that mainstream computer publications didn’t like to talk about. But not here. In this blog post, we’ll talk about one of the most innovative and popular copiers of all time for the Commodore 64, a program called Fast Hack’em, by Basement Boys Software. We’ll also talk about the company’s connection to Nintendo, but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves just yet.
When reading IBM documentation or looking at a piece of IBM hardware, you may see a reference to an unfamiliar term: DASD. In this blog post, I’ll explain what DASD means and what other terms you may know it by.
I was in middle school in 1986 when my friends started getting new video game consoles. It’s possible that one or two of them got them right away in the fall. Since it’s been nearly 40 years, the timelines are a little fuzzy. But I do remember visiting a friend over winter break and he had his new Nintendo NES set up. He was always the first to get everything new, but he was especially excited about this.
The Marx/Allstate steam freight train set number 9610 was an steam freight train set featuring a plastic steam engine pulling plastic freight cars with 4 wheels and fake trucks to make them look like 8 wheels. It replaced earlier sets Marx made for Sears like the 9644, replacing metal cars with plastic. It was similar to the 9611 set, replacing the diesels with steam.
I saw a YouTube video last week about the MSD Super Disk Drive, and the creator of the video said he couldn’t find any information about the drive. So I figured I would write something about it, since I kind of like Commodore stuff, and MSD was the first company to make third-party Commodore-compatible disk drives. But that’s not the only thing that made the MSD drives special.