David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
I saw some discussion about the Asus SP97-V motherboard recently. This happens to be one of my favorite socket 7 motherboards, and I used it in a good number of builds in 1997 and 1998. Initially, I was nervous about this board and the SIS 5598 chipset, but in the long run, it didn’t give me any problems. I share the opinion that it is a very underrated board.
30 years ago today, on November 1, 1994, AOL pulled the plug on Quantum Link. Quantum Link was a Commodore-oriented online service that was the direct ancestor of AOL. That makes today as good of a time as any to explore a tantalizing historical missed opportunity. Commodore could have owned AOL, a company that at its peak had a $200 billion valuation. Commodore, meanwhile, famously never reached its stated goal of $1 billion in annual sales.
In October 2024, Jay Dyer appeared on a podcast called Attwood Unleashed, in episode 178. He made some serious allegations tying Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein, and potentially even Sean Combs, back to the dotcom boom. Perhaps back to the very beginning of the dotcom boom. But some of his statements are problematic.
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.
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.