Bob Evans, mainframe pioneer, dies at 77
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Bob Evans, an IBM computer scientist who helped to develop the modern mainframe computer, died Thursday. He was 77. Evans died of heart failure at his at his home in the San Francisco suburb of Hillsborough, his son Evan told the Associated Press.
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The founder of Seagate Technologies died on Tuesday following complications from heart surgery.
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Al Shugart, a pioneer in the computer disk drive industry and one of Silicon Valley's most colorful entrepreneurs, has died. He was 76.
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Songwriter Ray Evans, who was behind standards such as Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera), dies at 92.
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Senkowski, Robert A. "Bob" Passed away unexpectedly at home on Fri., December 7, 2006. Age 67. He was born on July 17, 1939 in Milwaukee, WI.
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Platform Solutions, Inc. (PSI), the first developer of a new generation of Open Mainframe(TM) Servers, today announced Michael O'Hara, a 30-year IBM veteran, has joined the company as Executive Vice President of Sales.  Mr.
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Here's a look at the evolution of software coding from the early days of wires and physical switches to the untimely death of "automatic programming."
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Way to go Leaving aside the arm-wrestling practice IBM's legal department is currently getting with Platform Solutions Inc (PSI) and its ability to run IBM mainframe applications on any reasonably spec'd Itanium-based server, the availability of such software tools marks a development that could interest developers.â¦
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Maxime &quot;Max&quot; Faget, an intuitive engineer who became the chief architect of NASA&#39;s Mercury capsule and a key contributor to the design of three other manned spacecraft, has died.
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Let me show you my grandchildren at 40Gb/s 75-year-old Sibritt LÃ¶thberg from Karlstad Sweden just got her first computer, but it didn't take her long to download all the necessary patches.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - IBM is unveiling Thursday a new virtual tape drive management system for mainframes that compares to similar technology introduced last spring by rival Sun Microsystems. The IBM System Storage TS7700 Virtualization Engine is the successor to its TotalStorage Virtual Tape Server and offers increased capacity, faster processing speed and improved disaster recovery features. Because copying batches of data onto a tape is a time-consuming practice, tying up server operations, virtual storage systems save the data into a disk cache for transfer onto tape at a later time. The TS 7700 offers 6TB of disk cache storage capacity, a four-fold increase over the 1.5TB of cache in the previous model, said Cindy Grossman, vice president of IBM tape storage systems. An available 3:1 data compression ratio enhances capacity further. Also, because it operates in a grid computing environment, the 7700 can simultaneously copy data to two different tape storage sites for improved disaster recovery, said Grossman. Data can be "mirrored" to multiple sites and the system will know where to find it. IBM's announcement follows aÂ similar product launch from SunÂ by more than five months. In May that company refreshed its Sun StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager System, a tape drive manager also for mainframe environments, which also stores data in disk cache for later copying onto tapes and offers double the capacity and performance of its previous generation technology. SunÂ acquired StorageTekÂ in 2005. "These products tend to leapfrog over one another," said Mike Kahn an analyst with The Clipper Group, a research firm in Wellesley, Mass. Enterprises are looking for better utilization of their tape storage networks, including improved access to data on them, Kahn said. Storing data to a disk and then later to tape gives enterprises some storage flexibility. If an insurance company receives a claim form, it can save that on disk if it needs to retrieve it quickly while the claim is still active. But if a claim has been completed, that file can be copied onto tape. The virtual tape storage market for mainframe systems is a two-company market, of Sun and IBM, he said. The two companies last week each introduced new tape encryption technology one day apart.
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The first System z mainframe system in nearly three years is expected to be announced later this month. Patrick Thibodeau checks in with the ongoing struggle between mainframes and distributed servers for hearts, minds and budget lines.
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Ken Kennedy, a pioneer in computer science whose work can be seen in today's supercomputers and video games, has died in Houston at 61.  Kennedy taught at Rice University, where he founded the computer science department in 1984.
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(InfoWorld) - Sun Microsystems is still around. But what about the four men who gave it life? InfoWorld went on the hunt for Sun's founding fathers: Andy Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy, and Scott McNealy. Here's what we found. [See also a Slideshow: "25 years of Sun" | PDF: "Timeline of Sun's achievements"] Andy Bechtolsheim: An eye for innovation, and the bottom line Working at Xerox Park in Palo Alto as a summer student, Andy Bechtolsheim saw something in Xerox's Alto network workstation that Xerox itself couldn't: the possibilities of what such a machine could do with a high resolution display, a mouse, and a GUI. "The strange thing was [Xerox] never really productized it," Bechtolsheim says of the Alto, which inspired the creation of Apple's Lisa personal compute, as well as a machine that Bechtolsheim would build and dub the Stanford University Network -- or SUN -- workstation. Besides the convenience of a graphical interface, just not having to wait in a time share system for a few cycles was a "beautiful thing," Bechtolsheim recalls of the Alto and the later SUN workstation, which he envisioned as a tool primarily for CAD/CAM users. After Bechtolsheim's SUN workstation gave birth to Sun Microsystems, Bechtolsheim says he took a great deal of pride in the fact that his Sparc Workstation 1 and 2 drove half the revenue of the company for almost its first 10 years. As it turned out, spotting technology that has the potential to generate lots of revenue is something Bechtolsheim has a talent for. After leaving Sun in 1995, disappointed over the company's refusal to jump on the x86 bandwagon, Bechtolsheim found success with Granite Systems, a gigabit Ethernet switching company that Cisco acquired after a year. His next company, Kealia, was acquired by Sun in 2004, returning Bechtolsheim to the fold. Somewhere in between, Bechtolsheim also wrote a now legendary $100,000 check in 1998 to two more young Stanford grads -- Sergey Brin and Larry Page -- for what seemed like a promising idea: a search technology they called PageRank.Â  What did he see in Google that few others did? "It was a complete no-brainer," Bechtolsheim answers. Using the Internet to find things, he was frustrated that he couldnât find anything anymore, especially as companies started to game the system, as he calls it, by using key words to get a better placement. When Bechtolsheim heard about Google's ability to do page ranking, he knew that would solve the problem. It is said his $100,000 investment is now worth half a billion. Back at Sun after a long hiatus, Bechtolsheim says he's determined to put the company back on the track to the innovation and big profits that characterized its first 18 years. Whether or not he continues to have the Midas touch remains to be seen. -- Ephraim Schwartz Vinod Khosla: Scaling green tech Next to outsize personalities such as Scott McNealy, Andy Bechtelsheim, and Bill Joy, Vinod Khosla might seem like the silent partner from Sun's early days. But he's anything but, and the years since he left Sun have thrust him ever more into the spotlight. Khosla's stint with Sun was the shortest of the original founders. After helping establish the company with fellow grad students McNealy and Bechtolsheim in 1982, Khosla served briefly as CEO and then left the company in 1985 to join venture firm Kleiner Perkins. As a general partner at Kleiner Perkins and through his own Khosla Ventures, Khosla has thrown his chips into more than one Silicon Valley pot. He's scored big with companies such as Cerent and Juniper Networks, and fallen short with the likes of Excite@home. In an e-mail exchange with InfoWorld, Khosla recalled the heart-stopping excitement of the early years at Sun as it struggled with financing obstacles, technical problems, and the threat of losing marquis customers likes such as CAD/CAM giant Computervision. These days, Khosla tries to spend half his time on "traditional venture" and the other half on his new passion: green technology. Khosla was a strong backer of California's recent Proposition 87, which would have funded clean energy initiatives in the state. He's also a backer of research on ethanol to replace the United States' dependence on foreign oil. "My goal is to make green technologies cheaper than their fossil alternatives so they can scale beyond toys to actually making a big dent in fossil energy," Khosla wrote. Beyond clean energy, Khosla and his venture capital firm fund a nonprofit trust that backs work in areas such as microfinance, education, health, and affordable housing. As for the company he helped found 25 years ago? "Sun has plenty of strategies through which it could emerge as a powerhouse again," Khosla said. -- Paul Roberts Bill Joy: Thinking big about the future Bill Joy had earned his spot in the computer hall of fame even before he helped found Sun in 1982. While working as a graduate student at UC Berkeley in the late 1970s, Joy is credited with creating and disseminating the first Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) of the Unix operating system, and adding the TCP/IP stack to Unix, an act which earned him the sobriquet "father of the Internet." After helping to found Sun Microsystems in 1982, Bill Joy remained with the company until 2003, during which time he is credited with contributing to the creation of Java, Jini (aka Java Workspaces), andÂ  Sun's network file system (NFS). Joy even played a key role in designing the architecture for Sun's Sparc processors and the Solaris operating system. Since leaving Sun in 2003, Joy has focused his energies on the venture capital space, forming HighBar Ventures before joining Kleiner Perkins in 2005. While most of Joy's creativity has been focused on creating a better infrastructure for computing systems, he has also of late broadened those interests. In 2006 Joy helped start a multi-million dollar fund to design a more holistic approach to defend against biological viruses.Â  And for a man who it is said never even owned a rowboat, Joy is now building, according to Money Magazine, a $50 million high tech "green" yacht. The 190-foot wind-powered ship, the Ethereal, will be as green as Joy and his design team can make it, using among other things light-emitting diodes instead of incandescent light bulbs, a lithium-ion battery system to control fluctuations in electrical current, and propellers powered by diesel and electric motors in case the wind is out of the sails. -- Ephraim Schwartz Scott McNealy: Opening sourcing education For 25 years, the words coming out of Scott McNealy's mouth have been the best compass for ascertaining the direction in which Sun Microsystems was headed at any given moment. From pronouncements such as 1999's "software will all go free" to his screeds against Microsoft, McNealy has seldom hesitated to provide color commentary on the tech industry and on Sun's ever-evolving strategy. And, in many ways, the company's tenacity and predilection toward reinvention has been a reflection of McNealy's own personality as much as anything else. McNealy helped found Sun in 1982 as vice president of operations and later became CEO, completing a transformation from UAW shop foreman to Silicon Valley entrepreneur that was set in motion as a student at Harvard. It was a job he would stay in for 22 years before handing company reins to Jonathan Schwartz in April of 2006. These days, McNealy stays busy as Sun's Chairman and chief booster. He's also pouring his energies into the Global Education and Learning Community (GELC), a nonprofit he spun off from Sun in January that provides free, Web-based curricula and resources to teachers, students, and parents. -- Jason Snyder
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Alan Shugart, the co-founder of hard drive maker Seagate Technology LLC, has died, the company said Wednesday. He was 76.
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OCTOBER 07, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - Computer Associates International Inc. introduced a usage-based pricing and licensing option for its mainframe management products today, aligning its offerings with IBM&#39;s on-demand model.
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IBM&#39;s Blue Gene/L became the top contender to the supercomputing throne Thursday as Big Blue announced a new incarnation of the machine can perform 70.