I love old tech stories: What ever happened to storing pics with electron cannons?

It describes the IBM 1360, built in 1967, which could store up to 116GB on photographic film.

Reg reader unlocks secrets of LHC restart

(LHC = Large Hadron Collider)

I found this interesting:

Chris has now created an “unofficial” LHC portal with links to all the various fascinating CERN webpages, which are at the moment so little known.

In a superb twist, Chris tells us that the main users of the LHC Portal so far are in fact CERN personnel, who evidently find it the handiest way of navigating around their own websites. The portal is now linked to from at least one of CERN’s internal sites.

Remember, the World Wide Web was created to help people at CERN manage their documentation.

One of my favorite Mac programs is OmniDazzle. When it’s on, I always know where my mouse pointer is.

Earlier this week I upgraded VMWare Fusion to version 3. Unfortunately, now I can’t have OmniDazzle on while I’m using Fusion. For some reason, when you first start a VM in Fusion you have to click in the window (or press command-G) before input is sent to the VM guest, and with OmniDazzle on this doesn’t work. Well, if you click four or five times one of them will eventual get through, but then Fusion switches back immediately to “you must click in the window” mode.

So now I’m getting in the habit of turning off OmniDazzle whenever I launch Fusion. Bummer.

(I wrote this last week, but apparently clicked “save” instead of “publish”.)

Sputnik, spaghetti and the IBM SPACE machine: The 50th anniversary of the 1401

I’m glad we have the Computer History Museum to keep stuff like this from being forgotten. According to the article, they have two restored and working 1401’s.

Because of some comments I made, a correspondent on the SAG-L mailing list asked my opinion about zIIPs and zAAPs and software licensing. I thought I’d post part of my answer here.

My take on this is that the industry hasn’t figured out a rational way to price software, so all sorts of silliness or even evil keeps happening when businesses try to charge for it. I’d recommend this blog post: The Economics of Software.

So, software is expensive to produce but cheap to distribute. On the other hand, it’s not easy to switch from one “brand” to another. From the point of view of economic incentives, software vendors are a lot like drug dealers. If you’re not already a customer, they’re willing to provide it for you cheap in order to get you hooked. Once you’re hooked, though, they can make a lot of money by raising their prices.

For IBM, where they are the only supplier of the hardware needed to run the software, you have hardware lock-in as well.

If you look at everything IBM has done with zSeries pricing in the past decade or so, a clear theme emerges: they are trying to lure new customers to the platform while continuing to extract monopoly-level revenues from their existing customers. Whether we’re talking about IFLs and zIIPs and zAAPs or z/OS.e and zNALC, it all comes down to that.