Word: pc
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...makings of a classic power grab. Bill Gates, the richest man in America and chairman of the world's largest PC software company, announces that his next business target is the Internet, the world's biggest-and most chaotic-computer network. The move instantly becomes topic No. 1 in boardrooms and on electronic bulletin boards around the world. The assumption is that Gates, whose software runs 9 out of 10 personal computers, will do to the Internet what he did to the PC industry: seize control of key chokepoints and leverage his advantage to extend Microsoft's domination...
Will a record Christmas for PC sales also bring record returns...
...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 control...
...Richard Thoman, an IBM senior vice president: "We believe no one should have to wonder about the integrity of data calculated on IBM PCs." Some industry observers suggested that IBM may have had ulterior motives for knocking Intel's quality, since Big Blue will begin selling the competing Power PC microprocessor next spring, but the computer maker insisted it was only trying to protect its customers...
...simple explanation of why this could possibly happen is that any program can be made to execute automatically once it is on your hard drive (both Macintosh and PC compatible machines have the capability of running programs automatically upon bootup, for instance). Such a program might contain commands to do nasty things (like erase the hard drive's contents...