… I recently found this advertisement from around 1978 while sorting through the contents of my filing cabinet.  It may have been the first PC related scam. This flyer was sent to every PC retailer in the country.  Not one diskette drive was ever shipped.  If you could find one, a single sided TRS-80 drive was more than double this price, required the purchase of the expansion interface, and was somewhat unreliable.  The data capacity of a double sided 5.25 in diskette was 256,000 characters.

“Never trust a company with the word ‘World’ in it’s name” is one of the Rules For Life I developed from that long ago episode in my past.

I have no idea how I managed to hold on to this scrap of paper for so long!

If you follow the PC industry as I, you have no doubt heard many reasons why Microsoft named their latest OS release as Windows 10 instead of 9.  One explanation noted that the number 9 in Japanese has bad karma. In actuality most all of the single digits have some form of evil superstitious connotation in the Orient. Ya, I know. I also like the name Redskins. The explanations from Microsoft itself sounded phony and appeared to be overt spins from their marketing department. The real reason is actually quite simple and cogent. For more than 20 years, Continue reading →

My Encounter with storage structures while investigating Linux

You will most likely encounter an ISO file for installing Linux on your old XP machine.  After I downloaded this file, I dragged and dropped the file on my DVD drive icon in Windows Explorer and then burned the contents to a DVD.  I wasn’t all that surprised when I found the ISO file nicely burned on what is now a festive window ornament. Continue reading →

The theme of our next DCTUG meeting will be “What to do with your old XP machine”. As one of the presenters, I will demonstrate the conversion of older Wintel boxes to Linux. As I gaze at my accumulation of digital relics, I can’t help but reminisce about how I, and the PC industry got to this point.

Continue reading →