David L. Farquhar, computer security professional, train hobbyist, and landlord
Palm was a high-flying brand in the late 1990s, creating the first really popular personal data assistant. Then it seemed to vanish almost as quickly as it came. What happened to Palm Pilots, and the company who made them?
Somewhere around here I still have my old Abit BP6 motherboard. Abit is a long-dead manufacturer of enthusiast motherboards, and the BP6 was one of its landmark achievements. It was the first cheap dual-CPU board.
The Abit BP6 is a bit obscure today, but hardware enthusiast sites like Tom’s Hardware Guide were pretty excited about it in 1999.
Can SNES play NES games? That question is older than the SNES itself. But the two systems aren’t backward compatible, unfortunately. There are modern options that are, however. More on that in a minute.
There are physical limitations that prevent an NES cartridge from even fitting in an SNES. But there was a technical reason to make the two physically incompatible. Even if the cartridge would fit, it wouldn’t work.
The CPM operating system (or CP/M operating system) was the first popular operating system for personal computers. Its rise and fall has been fairly well documented, if not well understood, and its author, Gary Kildall, is a tragic hero in the early history of computers.
The Commodore 1541 disk drive was the most common Commodore 64 floppy drive. Commodore fans from the 1980s loved to hate it. It was the first disk drive priced low enough to gain mainstream acceptance. But it was slow and loud and unreliable.
We put up with it anyway. A home computer was a luxury in those days and most of us had some idea how lucky we were to live through that time and experience it firsthand.
The Atari heavy sixer, also sometimes called the Atari 2600 heavy sixer, is the earliest version of the popular 1970s and 1980s game console. While not super rare or valuable, it is more valuable than most of the later versions of the Atari Video Computer System. You can think of it as the original original Atari 2600.
When it comes to file types you should never trust, PIF belongs high on the list. PIF used to be an important file type, but it’s largely obsolete today. But if you’re curious, here’s the PIF file type meaning.
Get ready for a trip down computing history lane. But this once-important file format is risky today. In all honesty, it’s largely outlived its usefulness in most instances.
The Commodore 1581 drive was the C64 3.5 floppy released in 1987 to extend the usable life of its 8-bit line of computers. It was an 800K floppy disk drive using the then-new 3.5-inch disk format. It stored almost as much data as five 5.25-inch disks formatted by a Commodore 1541, and was the closest thing to affordable mass storage available for the C-64 at the time.
The Apple IIgs was a 16-bit Apple II with a Mac-like user interface. Why did Apple make something like that? Let’s take a look at the Apple IIgs vs Macintosh to understand what the differences were, and what Apple was thinking when they did it.
The history of Dell computers is a classic story of how a little guy took on a titan of business and ended up becoming a titan himself, the kind of story Americans love to tell. Like many computer industry stories, it started with humble beginnings.
Michael Dell wasn’t a total rags to riches story. He wasn’t a pauper. He was the son of an orthodontist and a stockbroker, and showed an entrepreneurial bent starting at age 9, when he made $2,000 selling collectible stamps. As a teenager, he earned $18,000 selling newspaper subscriptions to an untapped market he found himself. Crucially, by the age of 15, he was showing an interest in computers. His parents wanted him to become a doctor.