Newsletter Archives

• How the IBM PC changed my life

  Posted on November 25, 2024 at 02:45 CST by Will Fastie • Comment in the Forums

  

  ISSUE 21.48 • 2024-11-25

  COMMENTARY

  

  By Will Fastie

  In my computing career, two seminal events stand out.

  A few months ago, I gave a presentation at my local computer museum titled “How the NCR 500 changed my life.” That NCR model was originally announced in 1965. I encountered it first during my service in Viet Nam and then in 1970 when I became an instructor in its use during the last year of my hitch.

  I’ll spare you my hour-long talk, but let me give you a sense of the thing. In the field, the computer and its associated peripherals occupied two air-conditioned trailers, each about the size of a 20-foot cargo container. In my classroom at Fort Lee, Virginia, it required two cubicles 10 feet square.

  The Army version of the NCR had a whopping 800 words (4,800 bytes) of memory. Storage? Punch cards.

  That machine propelled me into computer science.

  A decade later, in August 1981, IBM announced the IBM PC. I would not be at the helm of this newsletter today, much less writing this article, had it not been for that personal computer.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.48.0, 2024-11-25).

  Commentary Creative Computing, IBM, IBM PC, IBM Personal Computer, Newsletters

• The IBM Personal Computer

  Posted on November 25, 2024 at 02:44 CST by Will Fastie • Comment in the Forums

  HARDWARE

  
  Creative Computing Magazine, December 1981

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.48.0, 2024-11-25).

  Hardware Basic, EasyWriter, Epson, IBM, IBM Model 5150, IBM PC, IBM Personal Computer, IBM-DOS, MS-DOS, Newsletters, Pascal, Peach Tree

• IBM will buy Red Hat – and look at the price!

  Posted on October 29, 2018 at 12:50 CDT by woody • Comment in the Forums

  I’ll confess I didn’t see this one coming.

  Good analysis from Sean Gallagher at Ars Technica:

  For IBM, the acquisition is about growing IBM’s business in the cloud—private, public, and hybrid—based on the position of the company as the open source and open standards player versus the “proprietary” models of Microsoft, Amazon, and other major cloud players. For Red Hat, the deal is about scaling up the company’s reach. “We can scale at greater speed,” said Cormier, “not just from a Kubernetes perspective, but even with the RHEL base. We can only reach a certain number of customers right now.”

  The offer, $34 billion, is $190 per share, which is 63% more than Red Hat shares were trading for on Friday. IBM’s shares are way down.

  Other IBM, Red Hat

• Sun won’t turn blue after all

  Posted on April 6, 2009 at 22:07 CDT by woody • Comment in the Forums

  Rats.

  Two good merger rumors and they both turn belly-up.

  Google probably won’t buy Twitter. And IBM (almost) definitely won’t buy Sun.

  Other Google, IBM, Sun, Twitter

• Google to Twit?

  Posted on April 3, 2009 at 21:15 CDT by woody • Comment in the Forums

  Man, the merger rumors are out in full force.

  The New York Times reports that IBM is poised to pay $7 billion for Sun.

  And TechCrunch says they have reports from two independent sources that Google is close to buying Twitter.

  Must be something in the water.

  UPDATE: Kara Swisher at All Things Digital says, “In fact, Twitter and Google (GOOG) have simply been engaged in “some product-related discussions,” according to one source, around real-time search and the search giant better crawling the microblogging service.”

  So why does the rumor get such traction? Because Google buying Twitter makes a whole lotta sense, for both sides.

  Other Google, IBM, Sun, Twitter

• Scott McNealy turning blue, as IBM corners the server market?

  Posted on March 19, 2009 at 19:20 CDT by woody • Comment in the Forums

  I don’t like to mention rumors in AskWoody (well, not too often, anyway), but it looks like the rumored acquisition of Sun Microsystems by IBM may be under way. (See the NY Times article.) At $7,000,000,000, it’s no bargain, but the merged company will boast more than 40% of the server market.

  That can’t be good news for Microsoft.

  Other IBM, Sun