1980s Archives - The Silicon Underground

Commodore Plus 4 and Commodore 16

Dave Farquhar — Sun, 29 Jul 2018 11:00:03 +0000

Dan Bowman kindly pointed me to former Commodore engineer Bil Herd’s discussion of the ill-fated Commodore TED machines on Hackaday. Here in the States, few remember the TED specifically, but some people may remember that oddball Commodore Plus 4 that closeout

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Cleaning NES games and consoles

Dave Farquhar — Sun, 15 Jul 2018 11:00:15 +0000

Anyone old enough to have played with an original Nintendo NES knows the problem: You plug in the cartridge, turn on the system, and get a blank screen and the power light blinks at you. The schoolyard fix is to take

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How to use a Commodore 64

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 20 Sep 2017 11:00:35 +0000

The Commodore 64 is rather unlike modern computers. It has a CPU and memory like a modern computer does, but the operating system and overall user experience is alien to someone used to computers that run Windows or Mac OS.

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Commodore 64 operating system

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 14 Sep 2017 11:00:40 +0000

The Commodore 64 didn’t have an operating system in the traditional sense that we now think of one. It most certainly did have a method of interacting with the user and handling I/O, including disk files. But the way it

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Central Hardware, St. Louis history

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 12 Sep 2017 11:00:54 +0000

St. Louis-based Central Hardware was one of the first big-box home improvement chains. It peaked in 1993 at 39 stores in six states in the midwest, employing 3,700 people. It was once the 19th largest hardware retailer in the United

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What happened to Tyco RC and trains?

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 11:00:28 +0000

Tyco is a name I certainly remember from my childhood. While I never had either of them, many people my age had Tyco slot cars and/or a Tyco train set growing up. If you’re wondering what happened to Tyco, or

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Most valuable baseball cards of the 1990s

Dave Farquhar — Mon, 04 Sep 2017 11:00:13 +0000

Baseball cards were big in the 1980s, which led to overproduction and the baseball card bubble. That overproduction spilled over into the 1990s, and so did some of baseball’s scandals. Between that, and so many people buying and preserving cards during

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Least valuable baseball cards

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 29 Aug 2017 11:00:33 +0000

I’ve talked about the most valuable baseball cards of the 1970s and 1980s. But what about the least valuable baseball cards? What does it take to be on that list? What is the Kmart blue-light special of baseball cards? If

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Commodore RAM expansion units

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 25 Aug 2017 11:00:57 +0000

The 6502-family CPUs in Commodore 8-bit computers famously used 64K of RAM at a time. But in 1985, Commodore introduced a cartridge that added up to 512K of RAM to the 128. Commodore followed up soon after with a 256K cartridge for

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Most valuable rookie card

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 11:00:54 +0000

When it comes to baseball cards, rookie cards are usually more valuable than non-rookie cards. But when we think of the Pantheon of valuable baseball cards, they tend not to be rookies. Instead, they tend to be scarce cards from

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