Retro Computing

On March 12, 1989, computer programmer Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote a paper titled “Information Management, a proposal.” Working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, he had a problem with information about particle accelerators and experiments being stored on too many different computers with no convenient way to access the data from another computer and no good way to link data stored on one computer to data stored on another one. His proposed solution contained early but recognizable descriptions of HTTP, HTML, and the URI.

Tim Berners-Lee didn’t invent the Internet. Kind of like Al Gore. But he invented something. And his invention did make the Internet infinitely easier to use, and it had many uses beyond his initial need to share information about nuclear science.

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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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The Amiga 600 was one of the last Amigas, and it became a symbol of everything wrong with Commodore and the product line. Retro enthusiasts like it today because of its small size, so it’s the perfect retro Amiga for today. But it couldn’t have been much more wrong for the time it was introduced, March 11-18, 1992 at the CeBit show.

The Amiga 600 was a cost-reduced Amiga for home use, similar in size and appearance to a Commodore 64. But internally it wasn’t much more than a repackaged Amiga 1000 from 1985, trying to compete with VGA graphics and 386 CPUs.

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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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26 years ago, on March 10, 2000, the dotcom bubble reached its peak. The tech-heavy NASDAQ reached its peak that day at 5,048.62, before the bubble burst and stocks went tumbling. Pinpointing when the dotcom bubble burst and when the era ended are harder. But pinpointing when it reached its highest point is easy.

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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

On March 8, 1983, IBM released the follow up to its very successful IBM PC. The new model was called the PC/XT and it carried the model number 5160. “XT” stood for “eXtended Technology.” It offered greater expandability than the original PC, but improvements in speed and memory capacity had to wait for the next model, the 5170 PC/AT.

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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

The Homebrew Computer Club was a legendary early computer hobbyist group in Menlo Park, California. The book Fire in the Valley and the 1999 movie Pirates of Silicon Valley describe the group’s pivotal role in the computer industry. Its first meeting was 51 years ago this week, on March 5, 1975.

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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

The Intel 486DX2, introduced March 3, 1992, was the first clock-multiplied x86 CPU. It was a clock-doubled version of the earlier 486 CPU. A DX2 ran at speeds of 50 or 66 MHz, using a 25 or 33 MHz front side bus. It was pin-compatible with the earlier 486 CPUs, using the same 168-pin socket, but the use of a clock multiplier let it run at double the clock rate, yielding a 50-70 percent speed improvement over running the CPU at the bus speed. Much of the speed gain came from taking advantage of the 486’s on-die 8KB L1 cache.

The 50-MHz Intel486 DX2 cost $550 each in 1,000-pieces quantities at the time of introduction.

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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

There is a popular misconception that AMD wasn’t good at cloning Intel CPUs. This is largely based on the observation that Intel released its 386 CPU in 1985, and AMD didn’t counter with its Am386 clone until March 2, 1991, nearly six years later. In this blog post, we will explore what took AMD so long, and how that delay played into future AMD CPUs.

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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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GEM was an early GUI for the IBM PC and compatibles and, later, the Atari ST, developed by Digital Research, the developers of CP/M and, later, DR-DOS. (Digital Equipment Corporation was a different company.) So what was it, and what happened to GEM?

It was very similar to the Apple Lisa, and Apple saw it as a Lisa/Macintosh ripoff and threatened to sue. While elements of GEM did indeed resemble the Lisa, Digital Research actually hired several developers from Xerox PARC.

DRI demonstrated the 8086 version of GEM at COMDEX in 1984, and shipped it on 28 February 1985, beating Windows 1.0 to market by nearly 9 months.
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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

26 years ago this week the Pentium III launched. It was noteworthy for being the CPU that broke the gigahertz barrier, but also for being a better chip than its successor. The Pentium 4 clocked higher, but a Pentium III at 1.13 GHz outperformed a Pentium 4 at 1.5 GHz. It wasn’t really until the Pentium 4 doubled the speed of the Pentium III that the P4 became a good CPU.

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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

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.

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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