David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
Figuring out when an item was made can be difficult. Sometimes there will be date codes on some of the parts inside, but not always. My friend Andrew Tolch reminded me recently that if you have the box it came in, there may be some very good clues hiding there.
Power centers were and unassuming computer accessory from bygone decades, but they helped to solve a real problem. And they are one of the very few vintage computer items you can still find routinely at a thrift store or estate sale at a thrift store price rather than a boutique price.
Ira Lewis Velinsky was the industrial designer for Commodore and later Atari in the 1980s. He was responsible for the curvy “Porsche PET” cases, as well as the case design of the short-lived Commodore TED machines, and later, the Atari ST. Sadly, Ira Velinsky died November 14, 2000 of a heart attack while returning home from Comdex in Las Vegas. He was only 46.
3Com was a high flying maker of network cards and other network equipment. And then they disappeared with a whimper on November 11, 2009. What happened to 3Com?
It was November 10th, 1983 that Microsoft first announced Microsoft Windows, a graphical environment for IBM PC and compatible computers. It arrived late and without all of the promised features, so it was very much like future Windows versions like Windows Vista and Windows 8 in that regard.
Caldera, the then-owners of DR DOS, sued Microsoft in 1996. There was some speculation at the time it was a front. Microsoft thought so. Because not long after Microsoft settled with Caldera, Novell, the previous owners of DR DOS, came looking for more. Novell settled the most successful of its lawsuits with Microsoft on November 8, 2004.
Radio Shack billed itself as “The Technology Store.” And at one time it was a consumer electronics giant. At its peak, it had more than 5,000 locations strategically placed so that a ridiculously high number of US citizens, possibly as high as 80 percent, lived within 10 minutes of one. This blog post collects and organizes everything I’ve written about this not-quite-gone, and definitely not forgotten icon.
Silicon Graphics was a legendary maker of Unix workstations, founded November 9, 1981. Its Indy and O2 workstations, powered by MIPS RISC microprocessors and SGI’s fabled IRIX operating system, are among the most stylish computers ever made.
Watch a Youtube video about repairing a 1980s 8-bit computer, and you can flip a coin about whether the problem will be the presence of MT (Micron) 4264 RAM chips inside. MT RAM chips of mid 1980s vintage are notoriously unreliable. Apple, Atari, and Commodore all used them, and those chips didn’t age well.
I’ve seen them in Commodore 64s, Apple IIcs, Atari 800XLs, and Atari 65 and 130XEs.
It’s November 8, 2026. I don’t know if AI is crashing. I don’t know if the AI bubble has burst. Not yet. Some people say it is. I remember the dotcom crash but didn’t blog about it, regrettably. Writing down my thoughts now will look foolish if nothing happens. But if something does happen, I’ll wish I had written something down to look back on.