Author: Dave Farquhar

I don’t think it’s any great secret that RAL 1019 is the color of the Commodore 64 breadbin and its matching peripherals. But what can you do in parts of the world where you can’t find RAL 1019 in spray cans? Here are some other tips for matching Commodore breadbin beige.

There are several reasons to want to match old computer colors. Maybe you want to paint a damaged case, or maybe you’re building a peripheral for it and want a vintage color for it. Fortunately there are some off-the-shelf matches that are fairly close, including in the Krylon Fusion line, which bond well to plastic.

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Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.

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Gotek floppy emulators are a useful piece of hardware, especially for retro PCs. The problem is they suffer from poor (or entirely missing) instructions. If you mess around with old PCs a lot, a Gotek is a must-have.

A Gotek floppy emulator is a drop-in replacement for 3.5-inch floppy drives that reads images off a USB flash drive. The Gotek can cycle through 1000 disk images on the USB drive by pressing buttons on its front panel. Goteks are really designed and marketed with vintage music equipment in mind, but they benefit old PCs too, for exactly the same reason.

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Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.

dfarq.homeip.net

For most of the 1980s and 1990s, computer cases were an off-white color people variously called cream, putty, or beige. It changed in the early 2000s, and from then onward, the most common color was black. Here’s why computer cases changed from beige to black.

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Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.

dfarq.homeip.net

After watching some 486 build videos, it became clear to me that optimizing DOS memory is a lost art. Yes, I made some boot menus and custom DOS boot disks in my day, but for power users familiar with DOS memory management, boot disks were usually a last resort. Memory managers usually free up more than 600K of conventional memory so the overwhelming majority of DOS programs don’t need a special configuration. Here’s how to use them.

The key is using HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE in your config.sys with certain recommended parameters. These programs move device drivers and memory-resident utilities out of conventional memory to make room for memory-hungry DOS programs. Using HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE is a bit of a lost art, so let’s see if we can un-lose it.

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Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.

dfarq.homeip.net