David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
What is MS-DOS? I guess the question dates itself, or rather, the person who asked it. DOS is obsolete today, but was so important in the 80s and 90s that people assume you know what it was.
MS-DOS was the operating system PCs used before Windows. It was the first popular 16-bit operating system, and was the dominant operating system of the 1980s and early 1990s. It did not multitask.
The bolt that holds one side of the upper handle of my push lawnmower fell out this morning. Here’s how I scrounged an upper handle bolt for a lawn mower to fix it without a trip to the hardware store.
O27 track clips definitely make it more convenient to set up a loop of Lionel O27 track on the floor. But they aren’t very intuitive. Here’s how to use O27 track clips, whether they have the Lionel or Ives brand on them.
Web browser manufacturers Google and Mozilla have been taking heat lately for wanting to implement a technology called DNS over TLS. This is an important technology, so let’s talk about what DNS over TLS does and why you need it.
An increasing amount of our communications online is encrypted, which keeps other people from snooping on what we do. Not encrypting our traffic to DNS, which is the Internet’s phone book, makes it possible to see who we’re communicating with online, even though the communications themselves aren’t visible. DNS over TLS seeks to close this huge privacy gap. When your operating system says your connection is secured, it’s only talking basic security.
I had lunch with a new friend one recent weekend. We talked about a lot of different things, but one of those things was debt. Is debt a sin against God? I know where that idea comes from. It’s something we struggled through together a bit. Here’s why I push back against that argument.
The Bible talks about money a lot, but not nearly as much about debt specifically. The Bible speaks more about the sin of pride than it talks about debt, and I see lots of pride on both sides of the debt argument.
Someone asked me last week if condensation on light bulbs is dangerous. While it’s not an electrocution risk, it is a sign of other problems, and I recommend dealing with it.
Sometimes, after 70-plus years of use, you find you need to rebuild or repair Marx switches. Although Marx didn’t design them with repairs in mind, you can fix them. It’s not hard.
It’s fairly common knowledge that Compaq made the first 386-based computer, but what about the 486? What was the first 486 computer? When did the first 486 computer come out? And why have you never heard of it?
The first 486 computer was the Apricot VX FT, a line of servers announced in June 1989, with general availability later that year. They were expensive and they were only marketed as servers, so that’s why they aren’t as well known as the Compaq Deskpro 386.
I dusted off my 486 the other weekend because I had some 90s nostalgia. And just like the 90s, I immediately ran into some trouble. The VGA connector didn’t fit on the 15-inch 4:3 LCD monitor I wanted to use. If your VGA connector doesn’t fit, you probably have the same problem I had.
VGA connectors used to leave out pin 9 as a key pin, to keep you from plugging the wrong kind of cable into the connector and damaging the connector. Modern VGA cables use pin 9, so if your cable doesn’t fit, check to see if the port has 14 pins or 15. A 14-pin VGA cable is almost a must-have if you travel and give presentations a lot, or are into retro computers.
A friend of a friend suggested to me that I should carefully preserve my Commodores and other vintage computer gear, because it’s the only secure computer equipment available. I said I don’t complain too loudly since security is my job. He then said I’ll always have a job, because so many security threats are deliberate. While he’s not wrong, saying all security threats are deliberate is unhealthy. Here’s why.
Deliberate security threats certainly exist, because planting backdoors in the supply chain is the best way to get into certain highly sensitive networks. But I’ll argue that more security threats are honest mistakes than intentional sabotage.