David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
During the post-war era, Lionel supplied its dealers with adapters that allowed pre-war box couplers to work with the post-war knuckle couplers.
Lionel themselves hasn’t made these adapters for decades, but reproduction parts dealers make reasonable copies of them that we can still purchase and use today.
Gotek flashfloppy drive emulators are a popular upgrade for retro computer systems, allowing you to replace finicky and expensive floppy drives and media with flash media. The flashfloppy firmware makes the drives much more capable, allowing them to work in a wider variety of machines, and also making it easier to copy image files from a modern PC directly onto the USB stick. Usually the upgrade goes very smoothly. But sometimes the drive doesn’t work. So let’s talk Gotek troubleshooting.
The first rule of Gotek troubleshooting is cabling. When the drive doesn’t work as expected, there’s a good chance it’s a cabling issue.
I was fixing a PC with a fairly late 486DX2-66 motherboard in it. In checking it out, I found an interesting setting in its BIOS: I can use its L2 cache as either writeback or writethrough. But what’s the difference? What are the pros and cons of writeback vs writethrough cache?
Writeback is faster but was harder to implement than writethrough, so not all systems support it. If it’s available and your software doesn’t malfunction, use write-back.
Computer Shopper was a monthly computer magazine, but it was more than that in some regards. Like the name suggests, it changed the way a certain demographic but computer. As hard as may seem to believe today, the main reason people bought it was for the advertising. The articles were good, but nobody bought it for the articles.
The Lionel 6457 caboose is a common and nearly iconic postwar Lionel car. It, or one of its close relatives, is probably the caboose you remember if you are into postwar-era Lionel.
The Allsop metal art large display stand #33306 is a useful ergonomic accessory for modern computers, especially laptops. But it also makes an excellent monitor riser or platform for using and displaying vintage and retro computers. Here’s a review with some tips.
I spotted a useful cable at a used computer store recently. I wasn’t 100% certain what it was, but I had the ability to rewire it into what I needed if it turned out I was wrong. Here’s how I went about identifying the cable with my multimeter.
They don’t make light bulbs like they used to. Well, at least they don’t make miniature light bulbs that work every time anymore, assuming they ever did. Here’s what to do when your brand new Lionel bulbs won’t light.
CRT monitors are getting expensive. CGA and EGA monitors even more so. In theory, every 1980s computer that used those types of monitor had one at some point. But the survival rate of the monitors was much lower than the survival rate of the computers, so there aren’t enough of them to go around. That’s led to a need to convert CGA or EGA to VGA.
Sometimes GPU fan screws go missing, and sometimes the only way to get a bargain on a used GPU is to buy one with a missing fan. There is a pretty good chance that you won’t have any suitable GPU fan screws in your parts stash. In my case, the smallest screws I had in my parts stash were M2 screws, commonly used on laptop hard drives and SSDs. But they were too big for the shroud on a GTX 1050 TI that needed a replacement fan.