IBM

Teleworking on the cheap

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Saving money , , , , , ,

As I’ve mentioned recently, my new job allows me to work from home one day per week. They provide me a laptop to take home, but that’s it. If I want other hardware, I have to provide it.

Fortunately for me, I was able to outfit my office on the cheap.

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Gary Kildall and what might have been

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , , , , , , , ,
Gary Kildall and what might have been

I didn’t have time to write everything I wanted to write yesterday, so I’m going to revisit Bill Gates and Gary Kildall today. Bill Gates’ side of the DOS story is relatively well documented in his biographies: Gates referred IBM to Gary Kildall, who for whatever reason was less comfortable working with IBM than Gates was. And there was an airplane involved, though what Kildall was doing in the airplane and why varies. By some accounts he was meeting another client, and by other accounts it was a joyride. IBM in turn came back to Gates, who had a friend of a friend who was cloning CP/M for the 8086, so Microsoft bought the clone for $50,000, cleaned it up a little, and delivered it to IBM while turning a huge profit. Bill Gates became Bill Gates, and Kildall and his company, Digital Research, slowly faded away.

The victors usually get to write the history. I’ve tried several times over the years to find Kildall’s side of the story. I first went looking sometime in 1996 or so, for a feature story about Internet misinformation I wrote for the Columbia Missourian‘s Sunday magazine. For some reason, every five years or so I end up chasing the story down again.
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Games would be just what Linux needed

Dave Farquhar Linux , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Valve is intending to develop for Linux, as an insurance policy against Windows 8. I think that will lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy. If more games are available for Linux, demand for Linux will increase, along with market share.

There’s historical precedence for this. Read more

Nook won’t turn on? Try these four things.

Dave Farquhar e-readers , , ,
Nook won’t turn on? Try these four things.

I’d owned a Nook Simple Touch for less than 24 hours when I had a problem. So I learned out of necessity what to do when a Nook won’t turn on.

I found several things to try to get them working. Don’t expect the same solution to work every time. But these things are good to know.

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There’s plenty of credit for the Internet to go around

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized , , , , , , , , ,

There’s a crazy rumor going around saying that the government didn’t do much of anything to create the Internet, and that private industry did it all.

I remember the Internet before the private sector got involved in it. I was there.
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Phase-change memory could change everything

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

I won’t call it a revolution, because I wrongly predicted that RISC (in the form of DEC Alpha and Motorola/IBM Power PC) would start a revolution. But Micron released a new form of memory this week that promises to at least be a game-changer.

It’s non-volatile like the flash memory in your cell phone, digital camera, or SSD, but with a longer life expectancy, and it’s much faster. It’s fast enough to potentially use it for system memory, as well as storage.
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I hope BYOD 2.0 goes better than BYOD 1.0 did

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , ,

BYOD is “bring your own device.” It’s the hot new trend in IT, except it’s nothing new. But it was bound to happen, I guess. Companies are tired of buying computer equipment, so they want employees to provide it. And counterculture, nonconformist workers are (I guess) tired of using boring corporate computer equipment. (And here I am, a strong advocate of buying off-lease corporate computers for home use.)

So, since companies don’t want to buy computers, and employees don’t want to use company computers, what’s the problem?

How’s about I tell you a story? Read more

Entry-level troubleshooting

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , ,

Ars Technica offers a very good, brief guide to troubleshooting computer hardware. Being two pages long, it doesn’t tell you everything, but includes some good tricks, including one I don’t always remember to tell people. To fully discharge a device, unplug it from the wall, remove the battery if it has one, then press and hold down the power button for 10-15 seconds. This discharges any power that could be lingering in the capacitors inside. Read more

I’m not sure Google was the good guy, but I’m glad Oracle lost

Dave Farquhar Copyright , , , , , ,

I’m not sure that either Google or Oracle was the good guy in the Java patent/copyright case. But Google was less bad. And it’s hard for me to see how ruling in favor of Oracle could have done anything good for the industry.
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Cleaning up a venerable and battle-worn IBM Model M keyboard

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Retro Computing , , , ,

I scored an IBM Model M keyboard recently. Usually when you find 30 year old keyboards, they’re pretty dirty. Here’s how I clean an IBM Model M keyboard.

I’m notoriously picky about keyboards. My weapon of choice is an IBM Model M, also known as the battleship or by its model number 1391401, which went out of fashion sometime in the mid-1990s. You either love them or hate them, and I love them.

People keep trying to tell me that I won’t be able to use them with new computers, but USB adapters from Belkin and Adesso cure that. I’ve used Belkin adapters and can vouch for them, but the Adesso adapters are cheaper and some Amazon reviewers say they work better.

I’m moonlighting writing a contract proposal, and one of the terms of my agreement is that I can use whatever keyboard I want. So I brought in a spare Model M. But it was filthy, so I spent some time this weekend cleaning it up. Now the prince of keyboards is ready to party like it’s 1989.

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