David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
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.
The Marx diesel freight train set number 9613 was an early 1950s electric train set featuring twin diesel locomotives pulling 7-inch freight cars, sold through Montgomery Ward. It’s an attractive set and a very good example of post-war tin lithography, which was becoming something of a lost art at the time.
It seems like Dell Optiplex computers get a lot of attention, but I’ve had better luck recently finding HP Elitedesk PCs. These compete with the Dell Optiplex, and they have a lot of the same advantages and disadvantages. In this blog post, I will walk through upgrades I used to turn a used HP Elitedesk 800 G4 into a viable gaming and streaming PC running Windows 11.
Transmeta was the last big IPO of the dotcom era, launching Nov 7, 2000. Some analysts call its $273 million IPO the last successful tech IPO until the Google IPO in 2004. Transmeta didn’t completely fit in to the dotcom era, because they were a hardware company. But they were still a technology company, and if their plans had gone well, they would have sold their product to dotcoms, but it didn’t work out that way for them. In this blog post we explore what happened to Transmeta.
Micron Computers was a moderately successful attempt by Micron Technology, a maker of computer memory chips, to market PCs. First released in 1995, the venture succeeded very well at first, and survived in the marketplace until November 6, 2008. Although not widely remembered today, Micron made dependable, reliable PCs at a fair price.
The first Compaq computer was its eponymous Compaq Portable, announced November 4, 1982. It was a suitcase-sized clone of the original IBM Personal Computer, with an Intel 8088 CPU running at 4.77 MHz running Microsoft MS-DOS. It was hardly the first non-IBM computer to run MS-DOS, but it was the first legal IBM PC clone with a high degree of compatibility.
Compaq shipped the first unit about four months later, in March 1983. It originally cost $2995 for a single-drive unit. A dual-drive unit, which was much more useful, cost $3,590.
Charles David Tandy was the chairman of the board, president, and chief executive officer of the Tandy Corporation. He was born May 15, 1918 and died November 4, 1978. Tandy was involved in the creation or expansion of three retail chains: Tandy Leather, Radio Shack, and Pier 1 Imports.