Stories about: Amdahl

For much of his 34 years at Intel, Justin R. Rattner has been a pioneer in parallel and distributed processing. His early ideas didn't catch on in the market, but the time has come for them now, he recently told Computerworld's Gary Anthes.

It was with some degree of sadness that I saw 3Com sold to Bain Capital and Huawei. But it got me wondering why we see so many one-generation companies.

Quick, what's the most influential piece of hardware from the early days of computing? The IBM 360 mainframe? The DEC PDP-1 minicomputer? Maybe earlier computers such as Binac, ENIAC or Univac? Or, going way back to the 1800s, is it the Babbage Difference Engine?

While WAN-compression solutions have been around for years, new compression advances have resulted in previously unheard of gains in bandwidth savings. Delta compression, commonly referred to as segment caching or byte caching, leverages pattern-matching techniques and large persistent dictionaries to dramatically reduce the amount of data sent across the WAN.

IBM's plan to acquire data mobility specialist Softek Storage Solutions marks another step along the way in transforming IBM's services business, according to company executives.

Mainframe computer vendor Platform Solutions (PSI) has countersued IBM, saying the giant company should not have accused it of infringing patents when it created computers that allow customers to run IBM's System z operating system and software on mainframes from other vendors.

Dennis L'Heureux, senior vice president for planning and CIO of Rockford Health System in Illinois, U.S., is this month's guest Premier 100 IT Leader, answering readers' questions about insulating your career from the threat of offshoring and finding an entry-level job.

Platform Solutions (PSI), a company that makes a system that allows IBM mainframe operating systems to run on Itanium-based hardware, is facing a lawsuit from Big Blue.

When the security benefit group's IT department hit the streets in 2004 to try selling a homegrown service to external customers, there was skepticism in the ranks. "I can't say anybody believed we would actually make a sale," CTO Brent Littleton says.

Cisco Systems has a new executive to spearhead the company's own use of IT.

There's been no one to challenge IBM's unprecedented mainframe monopoly since Big Blue ran off the last of the PCMs years ago when it got light years ahead of them on the silicon front, forcing them to close up shop and slink away.