David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
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.
The Marx diesel freight train set number 9639/9607/9608 was an electric train set featuring a plastic diesel locomotive pulling 6-inch tin passenger cars. It dates to 1958-1961, showing that even in the 1960s, even though tin lithography was becoming a lost art, it wasn’t dead in the United States just yet.
When Intel released the 486 CPU in 1989, there was no SX or DX designation on it. But similarly to what they had done with the 386, they followed up with an economy version. And they borrowed the same name designations they’d used on the 386. But the difference between the economy version and the premium version wasn’t the same in the two chip generations. In this blog post, we will explore the 486SX vs 486DX.
If you grew up playing Atari, you probably heard the story. Coleco made a deliberately bad Donkey Kong port for the Atari 2600 so they could sell more Coleco Vision consoles. In this blog post, we’ll explore the two sides of the argument that Coleco tanked its Donkey Kong port to hurt Atari.
Marx train set 21336M and 21337M are a pair of similar train sets from 1971 and 1972 sold through Montgomery Ward. Let’s walk through these sets, which featured a 2-4-2 steam locomotive with a slopeback tender pulling three freight cars and a caboose.
Ed Smith, the designer of the Imagination Machine, says it failed because Apple released its floppy drive in 1979 and that made the Imagination Machine obsolete. I think Smith is selling himself short a bit, or perhaps he’s giving people the answer he knows everyone wants to hear. In this blog post, we’ll explore what went wrong with the APF Imagination Machine.
I’ve conducted a dozen or so technical interviews in my career. All of them panned out, and some of them ended up being exceptional. And during that same time frame, I’ve seen others fail, sometimes spectacularly. In this blog post, I’ll explain how to conduct a technical interview, including how to weed out charlatans and identify talent with a high upside.
The Marx diesel freight train set number 9629 was an early 1950s electric train set featuring twin diesel locomotives pulling 7-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’s something I think we’ve all done before. You get done playing video games and you don’t want to just leave the controllers plugged into the console and laying around somewhere. So you pick up the controller, unplug it, wrap the cable around the controller, then set it aside or even put it in a box. Maybe you even disconnect the console and wrap the video cable around the console. But did you know that doing that can damage the plastics? In this blog post, I’ll show you a better way to store game controllers and consoles neatly without the risk of damage.