salute

Reporters' Roundtable: Happy 30th birthday, IBM PC

Happy birthday, IBM PC. Thirty years ago today, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, IBM launched its first mass-market personal computer.

The IBM 5150 PC was not the first personal computer. The Apple II was on the market then, as were computers from Commodore and Atari and from several vendors selling CP/M micros. But it was, by any measure, the most important.

Although not for technical reasons. IBM designed the computer architecture, for example, but neither the CPU nor the operating system. Rather, what made the IBM PC such a watershed was that, first, it came from IBM, the company that had computing technology already installed at just about every major company. Second, it was the first successful open computing platform. The PC-compatible era gave us Compaq and then hundreds of "clone" vendors. It gave us the software industry as we know it. And today, the vast majority of desktop and laptop computers that the world uses are direct descendants of decisions made at IBM in 1980.

In this Reporters' Roundtable, we're going to talk about how the PC came to be today, as well as look at where it is and where it's going, with two guests I think you're really going to enjoy hearing from.

First, a previously recorded interview with David Bradley, one of the engineers on the original IBM PC project. He wrote the BIOS code and is famous for creating the Ctrl-Alt-Delete reset command. Bradley retired in 2004 after more than 28 years with IBM. He has also been an adjunct professor at Florida Atlantic University and North Carolina State University. Bradley received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Purdue University.

After that interview, we'll talk with Michael J. Miller, former editor in chief of PC Magazine, and now senior VP for technology strategy at Ziff Brothers Investments. I worked with Michael in 1988 when he was my boss at InfoWorld. He is extraordinarily knowledgeable about the history of computing, and has a sharp eye for what works in technology, and why. Michael still writes the Forward Thinking column for the PC Magazine site. This week, he wrote several stories about the IBM PC's birthday.

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Salute is a Verizon-ZTE first

It's been confirmed that for the first time, Verizon Wireless is teaming up on a cell phone with China-based mobile device manufacturer ZTE. The debutant in question is the ZTE Salute, which we first heard about on Friday, and which is indeed being billed as an entry-level, easy-to-use vertical slider phone. It features a 2.4-inch QVGA (240x320 pixels) screen, a 1.3-megapixel camera, voice commands, and speakerphone. It also handles text, picture, and voice messages, and is Bluetooth-compatible.

The Salute includes a variety of Verizon services, including VZ Navigator with turn-by-turn directions, the Bing search app, social-networking tools … Read more

Free ZTE Salute for Verizon on its way?

Well, this is interesting. A new Verizon phone is on sale, and it's made by a company we haven't seen associated with Verizon before.

According to the specs we see on Wirefly.com, the ZTE Salute is a vertical slider phone with a 2.4-inch touch-screen display (240x320 pixels; 65,000 colors), and an alphanumeric keypad. Featurewise, it's a pretty entry-level phone; however, it has some of Verizon's familiar services preloaded, such as the subscription-based VZ Navigator for turn-by-turn directions, Bing search, mobile e-mail, and Internet access.

The phone also has Bluetooth, speakerphone, and a 1.… Read more