David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
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.
If you’ve used other types of computers, Commodore disk drives can be a bit confusing. In this blog post, I will give an overview of the essential commands concepts you will need in order to use Commodore disk drives. All of this also applies to third party drives like drives from MSD, the Excelerator Plus or Oceanic 118, Enhancer 2000, Indus GT, Blue Chip, etc. It also works on modern solid state solutions like a Pi1541 or an SD2IEC.
It wasn’t the only console released in 1982. It certainly wasn’t the best console released in 1982 either. But the Emerson Arcadia 2001 wrapped the state of the home video game console industry up into a tight package of a game console and accompanying cartridge library better than any rival on the market. And if you’ve never heard of it, that has something to do with why.
The Marx diesel freight train set number 9644 was a 1958 electric train set featuring twin diesel locomotives pulling 6-inch freight cars. It’s an attractive set and a very good example of post-war tin lithography, which was becoming something of a lost art at the time. It was technically a Sears exclusive, but Marx sold a very similar 8142 set to other retailers.
An acquaintance recently asked me what the difference was between the NEC V20 and the Intel 186 and why the NEC V20 makes a better PC clone than an Intel 80186. The V20, after all, was compatible with the Intel 80186, but it makes for a much better PC clone. In this blog post, we will explore the NEC V20 vs Intel 80186.
The HP 200 LX was a successful palmtop computer introduced in 1994. HP continued to sell it through 1999, an unusually long run for a 1990s computer model. In this blog post, we’ll dig into this largely forgotten form factor and why it became such a quiet success.
The second generation of video game consoles dates from approximately 1977 to 1983, or from the Fairchild Channel F to approximately the ColecoVision, although the years of release can vary slightly from country to country. In this blog post, we will explore what makes a game console second generation, along with who won, who lost, and why.
When you think of the Intel 8080 CPU, the computer that springs to mind probably doesn’t look like the Interact. The prebuilt Interact, designed for home use, with an integrated keyboard and tape drive, doesn’t look much like an Altair 8800 or and only superficially resembled even the SOL-20 from earlier in the decade. In this blog post, we’ll explore the Interact, an obscure 1978 computer whose maker went bankrupt after just a year, but the system still found ways to survive into the early 1980s.