atari st Archives - The Silicon Underground

Commodore 64 vs Amiga

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 03 Mar 2017 12:00:14 +0000

Looking at the Commodore 64 vs Amiga seems a little odd, at least to me. After all, the machines were never intended to be rivals. The Amiga was supposed to succeed the 64. Commodore bought Amiga because they couldn’t make a

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Commodore 64 vs VIC-20

Dave Farquhar — Mon, 07 Dec 2015 11:00:27 +0000

The C-64 and VIC-20 look a lot alike, and shared some of the same designers, but there are a number of differences between these two vintage computers.

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Why were early computers beige?

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 11:00:34 +0000

It’s a common question: Why were early computers beige? In some ways it seems a curious color choice today. Due to their tendency to yellow with age, there’s some occasional debate over what color early home computers really were. But,

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Building DOS gaming PCs

Dave Farquhar — Mon, 10 Aug 2015 11:00:48 +0000

The ultimate DOS gaming PC is a topic that I’ve seen come up in forums frequently, and that I’ve been asked directly a number of times. I guess since I published advice on running DOS games on Windows PCs on

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Where Microsoft lost its way

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 11:00:00 +0000

John C. Dvorak wrote an analysis of how Microsoft lost its way with Windows 8 this week. All in all it sounds reasonable to me. His recollection of DOS and some DOS version 8 confused me at first, but that

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How the IBM PC became the de facto standard for desktop computers

Dave Farquhar — Sat, 04 May 2013 11:00:31 +0000

I saw a question on a vintage computing forum this week: How did the IBM PC become the de facto standard for PCs, and the only desktop computer architecture from the 1980s to survive until today? It’s a very good

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RIP, Jack Tramiel, founder of Commodore

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 03:34:08 +0000

Commodore founder Jack Tramiel, the orchestrator of the first line of affordable personal computers, died this weekend at the age of 83. I don’t know exactly what to think about it, and I’m probably not alone, though it didn’t take

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Was CP/M overrated?

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 12:17:09 +0000

Veteran tech journalist Dan Tynan recently published a list of 10 overrated technology products, and CP/M was on his list. But was CP/M overrated? I want to dig into that question a bit. I think everyone knows the story of

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Commodore 128, top-12 dud? By what measure?

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 00:13:32 +0000

PC Magazine presented a list of 12 computer duds, and while I agree with most of them, my old friend the Commodore 128 makes an appearance. Commodore released several duds over the years, but calling the 128 one of them

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Windows, ARM, emulation, misconceptions and misremembered history

Dave Farquhar — Sun, 22 May 2011 16:44:09 +0000

I keep reading stuff about Windows and ARM and, well, I think people just aren’t remembering history. I’m not saying that Windows 8 on ARM will save the world, or even change it substantially. It probably won’t, since Microsoft tends

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