Informatics

The IBM personal computer model 5150

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On August 12, 1981 IBM announced the release of its Personal Computer, identified as model 5150. This expression, as well as microcomputers and home computers, had already been used before so you could say that actually the first personal computer was the Xerox Alto in 1973 or even the Olivetti Programma 101 about a decade earlier. The success of the IBM PC however was such that within a short time the expression personal computers started identifying a model compatible with the IBM one.

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Google confirmed that it bought over a thousand patents from IBM but details were not revealed. Some sources report that the patents bought are 1,029, according to other sources they’re 1,030, either way the amount paid by Google wasn’t disclosed. The important fact is that the acquired patents cover technologies related to hardware and in particular the production of microprocessors and memories but also Internet-related technologies.

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Specific Media will pay $35 million, partly in cash and partly in shares, to buy MySpace. It seems that News Corporation will retain a 5% ownership of the social network. In 2006 it was the most popular social network in the USA.

Some Pleiades supercomputer racks (photo NASA)

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At the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany, NASA has announced that its Pleiades supercomputer is now ranked seventh among the world’s most powerful computers. It has 182 racks for a total of 11,648 nodes, a total of 185 TByte of RAM, a total of 6.9 PByte mass storage and to run this supercomputer there’s the Linux operating system, specifically SuSE Linux.