David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
A few years back, an acquaintance asked me if I could recommend a VPN. And I’m afraid I didn’t give the best advice, so I want to recant and remedy that now. I think there are some misconceptions about what a VPN can and can’t do for you, so you may decide you don’t actually need one. But if you do need one, there is one and only one specific VPN I recommend. In this blog post, I’ll tell you how I came to choose this specific VPN service.
David Bunnell was the founder of three of the most successful computer magazines of all time. He even edited two of them simultaneously, straddling two very different worlds.
He was not only a pioneer of tech journalism, he is one of the all-time greats. Bunnell wasn’t just a great tech journalist. He would have been great in any specialty. I am sad to say they don’t make them like him anymore.
Released October 6, 1988, MS-DOS 4.0 is the forgotten DOS. As such, modern hobbyists are often curious about it. Why did so few people use it?
It was eagerly anticipated and was years in the making, so it’s fair to say DOS 4 was a letdown. It’s a misnomer to say no one shipped PCs with it and no one used it, just like it’s a misnomer to say no one used Windows Vista. But it’s very apt to compare DOS 4.0 with Windows Vista and there were very valid reasons to avoid it in the 1988-90 timeframe. It’s also fair to be curious about it.
Today I want to talk about a concept called learned helplessness, something that was widely studied and taught in the 1980s, but seems to have fallen by the wayside a bit today, although I certainly see it happening today. Computer security, especially the fields of vulnerability management and patch management, are very prone to learned helplessness. The good news is, it’s possible to overcome.
Commodore went through a revolving door of executives after Jack Tramiel resigned due to conflicts with Irving Gould. On October 6, 1987, it was Max Toy’s turn. On that day, Commodore hired him. And for a while, it seemed like Max Toy might be the one to turn the company around. In this blog post, we’ll explore what was different, and what wasn’t so different about him.
It was 50 years ago this month, in October 1974, that Creative Computing, one of the greatest computer magazines of the 1970s and 1980s, made its debut.
It was 44 years ago this week that the Ethernet standard was first proposed. That makes today a good day to talk about what I do to bring mystery jumperless plug and play ISA Ethernet cards back from the dead.
What do you do if you are an Intel competitor in 1995, facing an aggressive marketing campaign spinning 5th generation CPUs as a necessity, and your own 5th generation CPU is 18 months away from delivery? You hot rod a 486 CPU core, call it 5th generation, and hope for the best. That is what the AMD 5×86 CPU, announced in late September 1995, was. AMD released it in November of that year.
The number of Amigas Commodore sold has always been controversial. There is no question it was less successful than the Commodore 64, no question it was less successful than the PC clone ecosystem, and every possibility it sold fewer units than IBM sold on its own. But the number Commodore sold has always been a mystery, and it turns out I’ve been telling people the wrong number.