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Which Commodore power supplies are safe to use

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing January 15, 2019January 13, 2019 0 Comment

The stock Commodore 64 power supply was notorious. I can’t overstate how big of a piece of junk it was. It was terrible in Commodore’s heyday and it’s no better now. If you have a Commodore 64 and want to keep it working, you need to consider which Commodore power supplies are safe to use, and make sure you have a good one. Otherwise, at the very least, you need to consider repair and protection for your vintage supply to prevent damage to your 64.

If your Commodore-branded power supply doesn’t have the Commodore logo in the corner of the unit, like part number 390205-01 for the 64 or part number 310416-06 for the 128, you have to assume it’s unsafe to use. Other Commodore power supplies for the C-64 fail in such a way that they deliver unsafe voltages that cause serious damage to a C-64 motherboard.

Playstation audiophile CD player

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing December 13, 2018November 17, 2018 0 Comment

You may have heard rumors of a Playstation audiophile CD player. That’s a bit of an exaggeration. But early models of the Sony Playstation do happen to be a much-better-than-average CD player. And that may make them a touch more valuable than they otherwise would be.

Is Atari still in business?

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing December 11, 2018December 8, 2018 0 Comment

Is Atari still in business? That’s complicated. It might be better to ask is Atari still a company. A lot of things happened to the Atari name through the years and that can make it hard to keep track. It also gives retro gaming people something to argue about.

So let’s look at what happened to Atari. Atari is still a company, and that company actively uses the brand and Atari logo. But the ownership changed hands a lot in the last four decades, and sometimes multiple companies used the Atari brand at the same time.

Computerland: Pioneering national computer store

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing December 4, 2018November 19, 2018 0 Comment

Computerland was perhaps the first big computer store to go national. It played an important role in the growth of the computer industry in the 1980s. It faded toward the end of the decade but hung on longer than you might think.

The company’s slogan in the 1980s was “Make friends with the future.”

What is Lotus Notes? How IT becomes legacy

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing December 3, 2018December 8, 2018 0 Comment

Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino were a juggernaut in mid-1990s IT. Some people loved it. Most people put up with it. And then people quit talking about it and thinking about it, even though almost every organization still has Notes running somewhere. But what is Lotus Notes, and why did it fade from consciousness?

Lotus Notes was a popular software platform for e-mail, calendaring and collaboration in the 1990s. It was programmable and extensible, so many Notes shops created custom applications with it that became business critical. IBM bought it in 1995 for $3.5 billion, but couldn’t keep up with Microsoft’s marketing and the ecosystem that built up around it so it lost market share to Exchange. IBM sold Notes and Domino, its server component, in 2018 to Indian firm HCL for $1.8 billion.

OS/2 Warp: A tribute

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing November 29, 2018November 10, 2018 2 Comments

OS/2 Warp was my operating system of choice for most of the 1990s. It never achieved mass appeal, and I think I know why. But I still liked it anyway. Here’s a look at its advantages and disadvantages.

Commodore 64 clones

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing November 26, 2018November 25, 2018 0 Comment

The subject of clones was always controversial in Commodore circles, even during Commodore’s heyday. There were no true Commodore 64 clones in the 1980s and 1990s. Why? And would it have made a difference?

Texas Instruments Speak and Spell

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing November 21, 2018November 13, 2018 2 Comments

My first experience with a computer wasn’t with a desktop machine or a game console. It was with an orange handheld device called a Texas Instruments Speak and Spell. Many Gen Xers born in the early 70s can probably say the same thing.

What happened to Blackberry?

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing November 19, 2018December 3, 2018 0 Comment

In the late 90s and early 2000s, the gadget that said more than any other that you had arrived was the Blackberry, a little device from Research in Motion that let you read your e-mail and respond to it from anywhere. And then it became old-fashioned just as quickly as it burst onto the scene. What happened to Blackberry?

You might be surprised to hear the company is still around and that you can still buy Blackberry phones. But the device that made it famous, not retro enough to be cool again, isn’t its future. And it knows it.

Texas Instruments Home Computer

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing November 15, 2018November 21, 2018 2 Comments

Texas Instruments was supposed to dominate the home computer market in the 1980s. And on paper they had a good product. But things didn’t work out the way they were supposed to for the Texas Instruments home computer, the TI-99/4A. And that’s why you probably don’t hear as much about it as you’d think you would.

TI entered the personal computer market in 1979 and had some success in the early 1980s. But Apple’s former management literally doesn’t remember competing with it.

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