David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
I was in middle school in 1986 when my friends started getting new video game consoles. It’s possible that one or two of them got them right away in the fall. Since it’s been nearly 40 years, the timelines are a little fuzzy. But I do remember visiting a friend over winter break and he had his new Nintendo NES set up. He was always the first to get everything new, but he was especially excited about this.
The Marx/Allstate steam freight train set number 9610 was an steam freight train set featuring a plastic steam engine pulling plastic freight cars with 4 wheels and fake trucks to make them look like 8 wheels. It replaced earlier sets Marx made for Sears like the 9644, replacing metal cars with plastic. It was similar to the 9611 set, replacing the diesels with steam.
I saw a YouTube video last week about the MSD Super Disk Drive, and the creator of the video said he couldn’t find any information about the drive. So I figured I would write something about it, since I kind of like Commodore stuff, and MSD was the first company to make third-party Commodore-compatible disk drives. But that’s not the only thing that made the MSD drives, especially the MSD SD-2, special.
On April 25, 2024, Microsoft released the source code for MS-DOS 4.0 under an open source license. But it raised an old question. Why do so few people talk about DOS 4.0? Why did so many people skip from DOS 3.3 all the way up to DOS 5.0? In this blog post, we’ll explore how DOS 4 became Microsoft’s forgotten DOS.
Marx train set 55950 was an electric train set from Marx that W.T. Grant and Spiegel, two large retailers, sold in 1955. It featured Marx’s best locomotive pulling 8-wheel plastic cars.
The FSD-2 Excelerator Plus, also known as the Oceanic OC-118, was one of the more successful third party Commodore 1541 clone disk drives. Reviewers at the time liked its compact size, easy ability to change device numbers, external power supply, and metal case. But even more than that, they liked it because of its really high degree of compatibility.
The third generation of video game consoles was less numerous than the second, with Nintendo and Sega asserting their dominance. But there was more to this generation than Nintendo, Sega, and Atari. After the game console market came back from the dead, several other companies wanted in.
In a 1989 television episode of Computer Chronicles, Stewart Cheifet drove into the camera frame in an MG to start up the episode and said, “A small car and a small computer,” and held up an Atari Portfolio. In this blog post, we’ll explore what was so exciting about a computer that fit in your hand, something we take for granted today.
The Marx train set 3994 is an early postwar set, dating to 1948-49. A number of retailers sold it, including Sears, Montgomery Ward, and others. It was a mid-priced electric train set, O gauge, headed by a Commodore Vanderbilt Art Deco-style streamlined steam locomotive pulling 550 series freight cars.
The first CD-ROM drive is generally credited as the Philips CM-100, a product announced in 1985 for the IBM PC/XT. It cost $1,495 when it was new and its requirements were straightforward: An IBM PC/XT with 256K of RAM and an available ISA slot. And people did indeed use these drives with XT class machines. 286 PCS were still relatively uncommon in 1986.