David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
It seems like a good Jeopardy question. This early home computer was called the blank 80. In this blog post, I’ll fill in the blank, explain what the number 80 meant, and why the number was more memorable than the initials.
The early home computer blank 80 was the TRS-80, manufactured by Tandy Corporation and sold in its Radio Shack stores.
The Radio Shack Armatron was a toy robotic arm manufactured by Tomy, the Japanese toy maker, and imported and sold at Radio Shack stores from 1984 to 1991 and again in 1994. It was a robotic arm that you controlled with joysticks and it came with game pieces so you could make a game of trying to pick up objects and perform simple tasks.
Tenable’s Nessus agent has a fair bit of underappreciated power. The ability to force a Nessus agent scan on demand is a feature I hear people ask for a lot, without knowing the capability already exists. There’s a bit of setup that needs to happen in the cloud, but once you do that, a sysadmin can perform scan on demand from the host.
You can force a Tenable Nessus Agent scan on demand by dropping a file into a user-specified location, or running the nessuscli command. Read more
The site of 7597 S Lindbergh has a bit of an up-and-down recent history. It’s been vacant since Home Town Buffet closed in 2015, but it’s getting a new tenant soon: Harbor Freight Tools.
There is more than one Marx train set numbered 52875. For some confusing reason, at least four variants of this set, dating to the mid 1960s, exist. All of them are similar in that they feature a 2-4-2 steam locomotive with a slopeback tender pulling three freight cars and a caboose. But the consist varies. And in one case, the locomotive varies.
Kenny Lofton was a big star in the mid 1990s. He made five consecutive All Star teams and played a key role in Cleveland’s late ’90s resurgence. In between stents with Cleveland, he also helped Atlanta to a division title. So why isn’t Kenny Lofton in the Hall of Fame?
The iconic 80s song lyric “Human after all” appears in a couple of lines of “Something About You,” a New Wave hit for the British band Level 42 released in September 1985. It charted in the top 10 on three continents.
Low budget electric trains and Radio Shack don’t necessarily seem like the most obvious pairing. Here’s why Marx and Radio Shack teamed up for an exclusive train set, and why it didn’t go as well as either of them hoped.
The Marx Hot Shot, set number 4378 and Radio Shack Catalog# 60-2106, was part of the Great American Railroads series. It was a Radio Shack exclusive, sold only in 1974.
What did the 1980s taste like? If we’re going to limit ourselves to something available then that you can’t get anymore, I would submit Five Alive juice for your consideration. Five Alive was a citrus beverage, containing orange, lemon, grapefruit, tangerine, and lime juice. It was a product of the Minute Maid division of the Coca-Cola Company.
The Tandy MMS-10 is a self contained speaker unit that sits under a monitor, providing external speakers for vintage computers. Radio Shack sold them for use with 1990s multimedia PCs. But the MMS-10 looks and works well with an Amiga computer too. And who would blame you for using one with a Tandy 1000?