Home computing pioneer honoured
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One of the designers of the classic BBC Micro computer is recognised in the New Year Honours list.
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The computer age for the rest of us may have officially begun with the news magazine's unusual choice for its "Man of the Year" award.
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By Dean Takahashi, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.  Sep. 12--Ted Hoff, one of the inventors of the first Intel microprocessor, was catching yellow jacket wasps with plastic cups.
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A NEW service aimed at helping fix and install the "circuitry of modern life" was launched yesterday by the owner of Currys and PC World .
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A pensioner is urging others to follow her example and learn more computer skills.   Since joining the Gateways To Learning scheme at her local library, Dorothy Willets, 85, of Bedwas, Caerphilly, has worked to get a level one open college network qualification.
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Hit the mute button for a moment of silence: The co-inventor of the TV remote, Robert Adler, has died. Adler, who won an Emmy Award along with fellow engineer Eugene Polley for the device that made the couch potato possible, died Thursday of heart failure at a Boise nursing home at 93, Zenith Electronics Corp. said Friday.
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Sir Godfrey Hounsfield was a British electrical engineer whose work in creating the CAT scan won him a Nobel Prize.
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THE great-grandfather of modern computers was today being commemorated with a special set of stamps. Bletchley Park Post Office is issuing a first day cover featuring the 1943 Colossus.  (c) 2007 Liverpool Echo. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning.
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Ken Kennedy, a professor who founded the computer science department at Rice University in 1984 and eventually became one of the world's pioneers in parallel and distributed computing, died last week at 61. Computerworld's Gary Anthes remembers Kennedy.
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The founder of the Free Software Foundation comments on free software, Torvalds, Microsoft, and lazy users.
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Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen, in a nod to the city where he got his start, is helping launch a museum gallery devoted to the history of computing.
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A screensaver and social network for people with Alzheimer's wins a Microsoft-led software design prize.
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The Open Architecture Prize ties in to the chipmaker's efforts to bring computing and the Internet to more of the world's people.
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Computing legendÃÂ Steve Wozniak, inventor and cofounder of Apple Computer, will be online to discuss his memoir and answer your questions.
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Late comedian Bob Monkhouse is to feature in a prostate cancer research campaign, thanks to technology.
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(InfoWorld) - Inside the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, sits an odd-looking, refrigerator-sized contraption that could have been created by an out-of-control set designer for "Lost in Space." But this homely piece of hardware was the guest of honor at a celebration Tuesday night on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the introduction of the first computer hard disk drive. On Sept. 13, 1956, IBM launched the RAMAC (Random Access Memory for Accounting and Control) 305 and RAMAC 350, two models of a disk drive system that could store a whopping 5MB of data. At a briefing for the press earlier this week, Barry Rudolph, a vice president with IBM's storage and Technology group, said his PowerPoint presentation about the history of hard-drive technology would be too big to store on the RAMAC. About 400 computer industry veterans and others attending the celebration at the museum toasted the golden anniversary of the technology that advanced the computer industry and continues to do so today. "The hard disk! How many technologies ever last 50 years?" said Steve Wozniak, cofounder of Apple Computer Inc., whose hometown of San Jose, California, is also the hometown of the disk drive. "It's an amazing invention that changed the world." The RAMAC was capable of storing 2,000 bits of data on a square inch of disk space, a measure known as its areal density. On Wednesday, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Inc., which bought IBM's hard disk drive business in 2003, said it has achieved an areal density of 345Gb (345 billion bits) per square inch in its laboratories, using a technique that stacks magnetic particles perpendicular to the disk, rather than laying parallel to it. At that kind of density, a 2TB (2 trillion bits) disk drive for desktops, a 400GB drive for notebooks, or a 200GB mini-drive like those used in portable music players could be on the market by 2009, Hitachi said. Given those extraordinary capacities, a 5MB RAMAC seems inadequate, but back then such technology was revolutionary. "The first disk drive I saw was the one of the first ones IBM made," said Jim Porter, former publisher of a Silicon Valley disk drive industry report. In 1956, Porter worked at Crown-Zellerbach, a former paper products manufacturer that took delivery of one of the first RAMACs and used it to track the company's payroll, billing and other accounting functions. "Because of the random access memory, it was much more cost-efficient than tapes or drums for data storage," Porter said. With all the disk drives in all the computers, servers and other storage devices available today, businesses aren't having as much trouble storing data as much as they are organizing, retrieving and analyzing it to expand their businesses. Earlier this month, at IBM's Almaden Labs research center in San Jose, company researchers discussed what the next 50 years of data storage could hold. "We want to take that landfill of data and turn it into a gold mine," said Dilip Kandlur, director of storage systems at IBM Research. The researchers explained several new types of data storage technology in various stages of development. One of them, Intelligent Data Storage, would use software to manage a storage network, assess storage needs, analyze data and assist in retrieving data when it is needed. "You want to be able to tell the system, 'I want more storage of this type,' and have it happen," said IBM researcher Linda Duyanovich. Other storage makers, including EMC, are also researching new storage technology, said Gartner analyst Roger Cox. For sure, companies wouldn't be talking gigabytes, terabytes and petabytes of storage if it weren't for the RAMAC shipped out the door 50 years ago today. The Magnetic Disk Heritage Center is helping to restore the RAMAC at the Computer History Museum to its full 1956-era functionality. "In the technology industry, we throw away and over-write our history all the time," said Thomas Coughlin, a data storage consultant and founder of the Heritage Center. "I think it's important for us to remember the technology that got things started."
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An amateur cryptographer who beat the World War II machine in a code-cracking challenge is honoured.