Stories by Michael Cooney

NASA to build pod-like, high-speed everyday transport system

It looks a little like the Jetson's flying car but it travels on magnetically levitated highways. That's one vision of a future commuter system that could be developed by a marriage of NASA robot-control software and car-like pods from Unimodal Systems.

Industry mourns slain Cisco exec

A Cisco exec who was shot to death in Detroit last week is being mourned this week as a gentle family man, a "gifted techie" and a voice of reason.

Top 500 supercomputers: Welcome to the petaflop generation

Welcome to the petaflop generation. That was the message as the new most powerful supercomputer in the world IBM's $100,000 million Roadrunner system installed at the US Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory was officially named the most powerful and energy efficient supercomputer in the world.

DEC vs IBM

The companies tried to wear each other out in what was then called the midrange server market. The DEC VAX, rolled out in 1976 was a legend but the IBM System /36s and /38s were no slouches. Big Blue morphed those successful servers into its VAX killer, the AS/400 in 1988 and by 1994, 250,000 of them had been sold. DEC eventually tried to counter with its Alpha chip -based line of advanced servers but by the early 1990's Ken Olsen's engineering company was in trouble.

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