Word: pc
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Comparisons with germ warfare and sexually transmitted diseases were perhaps inevitable. A virus that struck Lehigh University quickly got tagged "PC AIDS." That analogy is both overstated and insensitive, but it stems from a real concern that the computer revolution, like the sexual revolution, is threatened by viruses. At Apple, a company hit by at least three different viral strains, employees have been issued memos spelling out "safe computing practices" and reminded, as Product Manager Michael Holm puts it, "If you get a floppy disk from someone, remember that it's been in everybody else's computer...
...mainframe computers that do much of the most vital information processing in the U.S. remain relatively unscathed. "With mainframes, we've got a whole regimen of quality control and data integrity that we use," says Bill Wright, a spokesman for EDS. But with the rapid spread of PC-to-mainframe linkups, that safety could be compromised. "If the same sorts of standards aren't applied soon to the PC environment," says Wright, "it's going to be a real problem for the whole industry...
...basic standards, while the smaller companies -- at least those that were not following Apple Computer's lead -- have manufactured compatible versions offering advantages like greater speed or lower cost. The copycats, though they have snared some of Big Blue's potential sales, have actually helped sustain the company's PC system as the industry standard by expanding the market for IBM-compatible machines and encouraging software companies to write thousands of programs for them...
...called Gang of Nine has seized the opportunity to part with IBM because they believe the computer maker took a wrong turn in its evolution of the PC when the company introduced its new line of Personal System/2 computers in April 1987. For the more powerful machines in the PS/2 series, the company drastically revamped the wiring, known as a bus, through which bits of data travel to various parts of the computer. The new bus, which IBM calls the Micro Channel, enables a computer user to perform such functions as writing and printing simultaneously instead of having to perform...
...strategy, in part, was to cripple the clones; the company even began demanding a 5% licensing fee from companies that sought to copy the PS/2. But the Micro Channel has proved too distinctive for its own good. Because it does not fully mesh with the old PC standard, the 34.8 million users of the original IBM PCs and IBM-compatible machines cannot use their peripheral equipment with the new PS/2 computers...