macintosh

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

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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 doesn’t seem fair.
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Happy birthday, IBM PC!

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Retro Computing , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The IBM PC 5150 turns 30 today.

IBM didn’t invent the personal computer, but if your computer has an Intel or AMD CPU in it, it’s the direct descendant of the beige box IBM unleashed on the world on August 12, 1981. Without a huge amount of effort, it’s even possible to run most of that old software on your shiny new PC. You probably wouldn’t want to, except out of curiosity, but you can do it.

I wasn’t one of the people who rushed out and got one. At the time, I was still watching Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers. I had my first experience with a computer–a Radio Shack TRS-80–in 1982, and the first computer my family bought was a Commodore 64 in 1984. Even in 1984, there were still plenty of people who questioned why anyone needed a computer in their home. My introduction to the IBM PC and PC-DOS didn’t happen until 1987.
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Rest in Peace, Mrs. Hill

Dave Farquhar Personal

My first day of high school didn’t go well. I had trouble finding my locker and trouble getting the thing to open, but that was nothing compared to what happened mid-day. I misread my schedule, went to the wrong lunch period, couldn’t find the science wing, and ended up 25 minutes late to Mr. Rusch’s earth science class. Mr. Rusch was understanding but stern. My next class was Mrs. Hill’s freshman English. Our assignment was to write a letter to someone, telling about our first day of high school. Well, I had a story to tell, so I took a pencil to paper and I told it.

“This is good,” she said after she read it. “You’re very good.” And from that day on, Mrs. Hill went out of her way to help me learn how to write. So for four years, I went out of my way to take her classes.

Mrs. Hill died on Wednesday. She retired about a decade ago, but from what I understand, her health really didn’t allow her to enjoy her much-deserved retirement the way she should have. I can only think of two other teachers who ever pushed me like she did.

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A snapshot in history of Gates and Microsoft, 1992

Dave Farquhar Software , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire is a 1992 autobiography of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. It’s old. But it’s a compelling snapshot of what the industry thought of Gates and Microsoft before Windows 95, before Microsoft Office, and before Internet Explorer. Indeed, it gives an early glimpse into the struggle to bring Windows to market, some of the bad bets Microsoft cast on its early productivity software, and just how close Microsoft came to betting the company on the success of the Apple Macintosh.

If Microsoft’s history were written today, many of these stories would probably be forgotten.

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How to clean an MBR and recover drive partitions

Dave Farquhar security , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sometimes it’s necessary to recover drive partitions because you accidentally repartitioned a drive you didn’t mean to, or because your MBR got infected or otherwise trashed. Here’s how to recover them, for free.

Infecting MBRs with malware is popular with virus writers again. And I fully expect chaos to ensue, because that’s what happened the last time there was more than one virus floating around that infected MBRs. They quit doing it for a good reason.

So here’s how to clean up the mess when an MBR gets infected, or when multiple infections blitzes the MBR and the hard drive loses the ability to boot, just displaying a message like Missing Operating System or Operating System Not Found.

We’ll be using the Gparted Live CD. Many Linux live CDs have the proper tools, but GParted works well and it’s a small download. You can try to use another Linux live CD, and it will work fine, but the icons might not all be where I say they are.

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Windows, ARM, emulation, misconceptions and misremembered history

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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 not to get things right the first time. But will I automatically write off the project? No. It could prove useful for something other than what it was originally intended. That happens a lot.

But I’m more interested in clearing up the misinformation than in trying to predict the future.
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Apple-Intel ARM partnership makes sense

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , ,

Rumor is that Apple is shopping around for a new manufacturer for the SoCs that power its mobile devices. And that Intel is interested in the business. I think it makes a ton of sense.
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The Revolution of 1985

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Retro Computing , , , , , , , , ,

Twenty five years ago yesterday, a revolution happened. Nobody really noticed, and nobody thinks about it today, but the effects are still here. That we take these things for granted today shows just how wide-reaching the revolution was.

It took the form of a computer with a 32-bit Motorola CPU, full stereo sound, a display capable of 4,096 colors, and a fully pre-emptive multitasking operating system. At a starting price of $1,295, though it rose to closer to $2,000 by the time you added a second drive and a monitor.

The specs on that machine don’t sound all that impressive today, but keep in mind what else was available in 1985. The state of the art from IBM was the 16-bit IBM PC/AT with very limited sound capability, color as an expensive option, and DOS 2.1. Windows at the time was little more than a glorified DOS shell. Apple had its Macintosh, but it cost twice as much as an Amiga, had only slightly better sound than that IBM, and just a tiny black and white display.

Over the course of the next nine years, Commodore sold 3 million Amigas. Along the way, they worked out the early glitches in the machine, and upgraded the capabilities, though not always as quickly as the competition. But the machine aged remarkably well. And ultimately it did for television production what the Macintosh did for publishing, replacing hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of specialized equipment with equipment that merely cost thousands, and fit comfortably on a large desk.

The big problem was that Commodore sold those three million machines to one million people, and never really knew what to do with it. It should have been a great business computer. It was the ultimate home computer. It could have been the ultimate education computer. And it was the ultimate video editing computer. But Commodore never marketed it effectively as any of those.

Mostly the company went through the motions while financier Irving Gould lined his pockets with whatever money was left after Commodore got done paying the bills each quarter. Some years, Commodore spent more money on Gould’s and his yes-man company president’s salaries than they spent on Amiga development.

So, slowly but surely, the competition caught up. VGA was better in some regards than the Amiga graphics and worse in others, but over time, the combination of VGA and fast 386 and 486 CPUs became enough to keep pace. Macintosh graphics followed a similar curve. Affordable sound cards for PCs started appearing in the late 1980s and were commonplace by 1992 or 93. It was a lot harder to get it all working on a PC, but when it worked, it worked pretty well. But making DOS boot disks to get it all working was a black art, an art I remember practicing at least until 1998.

It was in the early 1990s that PCs and Macs got multitasking. First it was horrible cooperative multitasking, followed later by pre-emptive multitasking like the Amiga had. Eventually they even added memory protection, something Amiga didn’t have (when it was initially designed with an 8 MHz CPU and 256K of RAM, that was the one thing they had to leave out).

The money ran out in 1994, and the rights to the architecture changed hands more times than most people can count. The Amiga’s days as a mainstream computer–if it ever could claim to be one–ended then.

The rest of the world spent the 1990s catching up. When Windows 95 came out with its promise of Plug and Play, improved multimedia, and pre-emptive multitasking, it was all old news to Amigans. Amigas had been doing all that for 10 years already.

For a long time after 1994, I was bitter. I’m less so now that the rest of the world has caught up. But I still wonder sometimes what might have been, if the industry had spent the 15 years between 1985 and 2000 innovating, rather than just catching up.

My standard security lecture

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , , , , ,

Myth: Nobody wants to get into my computer because I don’t have anything important saved on it.

Fact: I don’t care who you are or what you do with your computer, security is important. Do you want the Russian Mafia using your computer? The North Korean military? Al Qaeda?

If you’re OK with that kind of vermin using your computer, then do whatever you want. I hope you don’t have problems sleeping at night. If you don’t want that kind of vermin using your computer, I suggest you read on.Odds are, the next 9/11 isn’t going to involve airplanes or even bombs. It’s more likely to be a computer attack of some sort.

Modern computer viruses generally join infected computers together into large networks, which then “phone home” for orders. They can sit dormant for a long time, or they can start carrying out orders immediately. Those orders could be sending out spam e-mail messages. Or those orders could be to conduct an attack on some other computer, perhaps a bank, or perhaps a government or military operation.

Imagine Al Qaeda building a network of a few million computers, then using that network to overwhelm an important computer. When Amazon or eBay have a bad day and you can’t get to them, it’s possible they’re being attacked and struggling to cope with it.

The same approach that crashes Amazon.com could theoretically be used to crash the stock market or the Space Shuttle. Fortunately, that kind of trick is nearly impossible. But not completely.

Building the network is the easy part. Locating a target to point it at is the hard part.

The network already exists. There was a virus expected to trigger on April 1 of this year. It didn’t, for whatever reason. But everything isn’t OK. The network still exists, it’s still growing, and nobody’s figured out yet who built it, what they intend to do with it, and how to get in and disable it. Believe me, there are experts around the world trying to figure it out.

Whoever or whatever is behind it, you don’t want your computer unwittingly participating in it.

Here’s to avoid inadvertently aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists with sloppy computer security practices.

1. Use antivirus software and keep it up to date. Many Internet providers will give you antivirus software for free these days. Call your provider and ask. If not, download Microsoft Security Essentials.

2. Configure Automatic Updates. This allows Microsoft to fix security vulnerabilities in your computer as they’re discovered. Macintosh users, don’t get smug. You need to configure Apple update too–Apple releases a dozen or so fixes every month to fix security issues on Macs too.

3. Don’t open unexpected e-mail attachments. It’s been 12 years since this has been safe to do, but people do it anyway. STOP. NOW. I don’t care how funny the joke is, or how cute or hot or whatever the picture is.

4. Don’t open unexpected e-mail, for that matter. Booby-trapping an e-mail message with a virus isn’t especially difficult to do. Frankly, if any e-mail message looks suspicious (a subject line like HOT HORNY SINGLES WANT TO TALK TO YOU NOW! is usually a giveaway), I just delete it.

5. And if you ignore steps 3 and 4, for Pete’s sake, don’t buy anything. Nearly 10% of people actually buy something based on spam e-mail messages. That just encourages all of this other activity.

6. Use web-based e-mail. Most web-based providers use good spam and virus filtering, giving you an extra layer of protection.

7. Use an alternative web browser and e-mail program. Internet Explorer is literally a superhighway for viruses and other malicious software to hook directly into the operating system. Use Firefox, Chrome, or Opera.

Have I scared the living daylights out of you? Good. If your computer is beyond help, get a reputable IT professional to clean it up. Then start doing these things. If your computer is OK right now, start doing these things.

And then stop aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists.

Happy Patch Tuesday

Dave Farquhar Software , , , , ,

Today was the first Patch Tuesday in nearly four years that I didn’t have to worry about professionally. Since Microsoft released 13 patches today and Adobe released two, my former coworkers might be wondering if I knew something. (I didn’t.)

But I still patched my machine at home, and I recommend you do too. Macintosh owners, you’re not immune, so I have some homework for you too.The Adobe patches apply to Acrobat and to the so-called Adobe Reader (which used to be called Acrobat Reader). I recommend you launch Adobe Reader, go to the Help menu, and select Check for Updates. Unless you’re reading this site on a Commodore 64, these updates apply to you.

Mac users tend to be awfully smug about security, and that myth really needs to stop. Apple hasn’t released any security fixes this month, but they did release 9 fixes last month. The biggest one fixes flaws in 16 different applications. Microsoft probably would have released 16 different patches instead of just one. I prefer the Microsoft approach–besides being a little more honest, it also results in smaller download packages if by some chance one or more of those 16 vulnerabilities happen to not apply to a particular machine.

And now, please excuse me for a moment while I recover from the shock of having used the word “honest” to describe Microsoft.

Just out of curiosity, I looked, and Apple has released security updates every month this year except for April. Unlike Microsoft, they don’t follow a set schedule, and the month isn’t over yet, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see something from them later this month.

I won’t bore you with the details, but basically, what it comes down to is this: If I really want into your computer, all I really have to do is booby-trap a file and get you to open it. It could be a PDF file, a movie, a music file, or something else. I can embed code into that file that gives me complete control of the computer. I just have to know whether your computer runs Mac OS or Windows. And how to write the code, of course. (I don’t know how to write the code and I don’t want control of your computer, so there’s no reason to be afraid of me.)

If you’ve been installing your patches, there’s little reason to be afraid of the guy who who DOES know how to write the code and DOES want control of your computer.

Your computer may update automatically. If you don’t know for certain whether it does, I suggest you find out. Now. No matter whose name is stamped on the case.