Retro Computing

It’s a meme from the turn of the century, an irony to end all ironies. The cheapest computers on the market at the time, which were arguably obsolete the day before you bought them, had stickers on the front bragging they were never obsolete. Of course I’m talking about the eMachines Never Obsolete marketing campaign. Emachines was for a time a very popular line of inexpensive PCs, and the company held its initial public offering March 23, 2000, after selling 2 million PCs in 1999.

Now, what eMachines said and what they meant by never obsolete were two very different things, but if anything that just made the stickers more ludicrous.

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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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CPUs didn’t have brand names, besides the manufacturer, until the 1990s. They had part numbers and clock speeds. Frequently we shortened the part numbers. The 486’s full part number was 80486. The courts wouldn’t let Intel trademark a number, so the 486 was the last CPU of its kind, raising the question: What came after 486?

The follow-up for the 486 was the Pentium, at least in Intel’s case, and it was introduced March 22, 1993. But several companies made 486 CPUs, and several of those released their own follow-ups to the 486, including AMD and Cyrix.

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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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AOL, also known as America Online, wasn’t the first online service. But it became the biggest and most popular one. For many people of a certain age, AOL was their first experience with a modem, or with the Internet. Let’s take a look back at AOL history and how its legacy affects things even today.

AOL long had a reputation as a place where inexperienced, unsophisticated computer users hung out, but the company had a long streak of innovation and was ahead of its time in many regards. I’ll bet you had no idea the history of America Online begins way back in 1983. And you may also be surprised to hear the company still exists, though in a different form, even today.

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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 13, 1986, Microsoft shook up the financial world, and to some degree, we are still feeling the reverberations from that 40 years later. That was the day of Microsoft’s very successful IPO. The hunt for the next Microsoft began immediately, leading directly to the dotcom bubble of the turn of the century. And arguably, the desire for Microsoft and the tech companies who emerged out of the dotcom bubble to prevent another Microsoft contributed to the AI bubble of the mid 2020s.

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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 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.

dfarq.homeip.net

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.

dfarq.homeip.net

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