Stories by: Gary Anthes

There's an age-old choice in IT -- whether to adopt a "best of breed" strategy for the power and flexibility it can bring, or go with a single vendor for accountability and simplicity. J. Craig Venter Institute Inc. (JCVI) believes in best of breed. The genomic research company runs Linux, Unix, Windows and Mac OS in its data center. For storage, it draws on technology from EMC, NetApp, Isilon, DataDomain and Symantec.

Thirty years ago, on June 8, 1978, Intel introduced its first 16-bit microprocessor, the 8086, with a splashy ad heralding "the dawn of a new era." Overblown? Sure, but also prophetic. While the 8086 was slow to take off, its underlying architecture -- later referred to as x86 -- would become one of technology's most impressive success stories.

William Scherlis is a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the Institute for Software Research there. He specializes in software assurance, software evolution and technology to support software teams. He has a long association with NASA and the US Department of Defense. Scherlis spoke with Gary Anthes about progress in software development.

You might think that measuring return on investment is one of those things that never changes. You'd be wrong.

The WIMP human-computer interface may have an uninspiring name, but Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointing devices have dominated computing for some 15 years. The keyboard, mouse and display screen have served users extraordinarily well.

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.

Until recently, I thought "second life" referred to one of those places the Bible says we'll go after we depart this life.

A company today can buy a terabyte of enterprise-class disk storage for about $US5000. Eight years ago, it would have cost $US200,000. Even the dramatic drop in the cost of processing doesn't happen that fast.

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?

On the surface, encryption has always seemed a no-brainer. Why expose confidential information to prying eyes when you could protect it by scrambling it? But even though encryption technologies have been widely available for more than 10 years, they have been slow to catch on.

There is nothing in computer science as basic as the binary number system. In fact, the word binary is often used to refer to something that's too simple, as in, "He's a binary thinker," meaning he can't see shades of grey. (Or the digits 2 through 9.)