Comments for The Silicon Underground

Comment on Why people say CRTs don’t have pixels by neo

neo — Fri, 29 May 2026 19:40:03 +0000

is Tandy CM-11 monitor best CGA monitor for Tandy 100t or any better CGA monitor from other companies for retro computing

Comment on Texas Instruments 486SXL CPU by neo

neo — Fri, 15 May 2026 02:15:33 +0000

so how fast is say 33mhz Texas Instruments 486SXL vs 33mhz Cyrix 486DLC vs Intel 33mhz i486

was there any Texas Instruments with 486 speed on a 386sx 16 bit bus?

Comment on Sony Betamax VCR: Born May 10, 1975 by Luyd Freitas

Luyd Freitas — Thu, 14 May 2026 12:27:50 +0000

Even though Betamax theoretically has better quality, I can’t see the improvements compared to VHS.

And the fact that Beta tapes were only 1 hour long doomed the system forever; to be successful it would have to at least cover the 90 minutes of a typical film.

Comment on Why the Wannacry outbreak was so bad by Luyd Freitas

Luyd Freitas — Thu, 14 May 2026 12:18:22 +0000

I was affected by WannaCry in 2018.

However, it only encrypted files that were on the same partition/disk as Windows.
Since 95% of the files were on another disk, I didn’t suffer serious damage; a quick format and that was it.

That’s because I was using a good antivirus at the time.

Comment on Intel Pentium II introduced May 7, 1997 by Luyd Freitas

Luyd Freitas — Thu, 14 May 2026 12:16:03 +0000

I already commented on this post last year, I did the same.
Our PII 233 MHz (the first one released) was overclocked to 350MHz, the minimum to run YouTube videos in 2006 without crashing, that was in 360p, when 480p was still emerging.

Good times, it worked overclocked until 2013, when the processor finally died in peace, a total of 15 years of operation.

Comment on Adobe’s subscription model by Luyd Freitas

Luyd Freitas — Thu, 14 May 2026 12:10:49 +0000

Yes, I understand, but unfortunately the whole world is moving towards a subscription system.

Basically everything related to software is becoming a subscription, and I think Adobe is partly to blame for that; in 2013, subscribing to a service to get programs wasn’t popular yet.

Comment on Adobe’s subscription model by Luyd Freitas

Luyd Freitas — Thu, 14 May 2026 12:08:00 +0000

In reply to Dave Farquhar. I read that there was a bill in the US that wanted to make a game public domain if 30 years have passed since its last official publication. This would include various abandonware games, mainly DOS games, and games from the second to the fourth generation of consoles.

Comment on Adobe’s subscription model by Magnum

Magnum — Fri, 08 May 2026 05:47:46 +0000

Another way Adobe’s software practices suck is that PDFViewer which is free contains a whole lot of other functionality, maybe even unrelated to PDFs at all, which Adobe will unlock if you pay them. So you are forced to download a whole lot of extra crap wasting both bandwidth and disk space; and they’ve been doing this for nearly two decades, back when these issues were a much bigger deal.

According to some reports, as well as wasting bandwidth and space the extra code on your system increased its surface area to hacking vulnerabilities! Yay Adobe!

Comment on Intel Pentium II introduced May 7, 1997 by Magnum

Magnum — Fri, 08 May 2026 05:34:46 +0000

In reply to Magnum. I should have mentioned the reason I wanted dual CPUs was because I was running BeOS!

Comment on Intel Pentium II introduced May 7, 1997 by James

James — Thu, 07 May 2026 18:52:45 +0000

I remember learning that a particular stepping of PII-300 could be reliably overclocked to 450 MHz. I bought one along with an Abit BH6 motherboard and ended up with a screaming fast PC that I could afford on my burger flipping teenager wages. I ran that machine until I eventually upgraded to a 1.4GHz Athlon.