Word: ibm
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...almost dizzyingly complex. Huge racks of computer disk drives called file servers store movies and other "video assets" in digital form. Giant switches called ATMS shuttle prodigious quantities of data at blistering speeds. A set-top box with five times the computing power of a top-of-the-line IBM PC downloads images from the server at the rate of 30 pictures a second. Press a button on the remote, and the signal travels through cable-TV lines, fiber-optic wires, switches and servers on the other side of town in less time than it takes for a conventional remote...
...IBM refuses to ship computers with flawed Pentium chips...
Intel had reason to be high-handed: 80% of personal computers used in the world have "Intel inside." But the company didn't count on being blindsided by another behemoth. Last week IBM, the world's largest computer maker and one of Intel's biggest customers, announced that it was halting shipments of all its products containing the Pentium (about half the personal computers it is at present sending out to stores). Brandishing its own laboratory research, IBM contended that the chip's mistakes were far more frequent than Intel had let on. Said G. Richard Thoman, an IBM senior...
While researchers at Intel and IBM debated the seriousness of the problem, customers who had bought -- or planned to buy -- Pentium-based computers were confused and often angry. Intel admitted last week that tens of thousands of customers have called about the problem. Easing its earlier hard line, the company agreed to replace a few thousand of the chips for buyers who requested a switch, and it will soon begin selling a corrected model. But to Robert Sombric, the data-processing manager for the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, government, Intel's decision to go on selling the flawed chips for months...
...wild card in all this is the flood of new games published on CD-ROMs for personal computers. Having languished on computer-store shelves for nearly a decade, CD-ROM's for Macintosh and IBM-compatible PCs are suddenly taking off. "Trip got blindsided by CD-ROMs," says John Taylor, an analyst at L.H. Alton, a San Francisco-based investment firm. "People who bought PCs for all sorts of reasons are saying, 'I just spent $2,500 for my multimedia computer. Why should I spend $400 on a dedicated game machine...