IT tech: 10 madcap, fascinating and cool stories

Friday, April 18, 2014

IT tech: 10 madcap, fascinating and cool stories

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Network World Special Alert" <nww_newsletters@newsletters.networkworld.com>
Date: Apr 18, 2014 10:45 AM
Subject: IT tech: 10 madcap, fascinating and cool stories
To: <aquarianm@gmail.com>
Cc:

13 pieces of classic software whose code is now accessible | 2014's 25 Geekiest 25th Anniversaries

Network World Special Alert

Forward this to a Friend >>>

The IRS uses computers?! The horror!
It's impossible to imagine the Internal Revenue Service or most other number-crunching agencies or companies working without computers. But when the IRS went to computers -- the Automatic Data Processing system --there was an uproar. The agency went so far as to produce a short film on the topic called Right On The Button, to convince the public computers were a good thing. Read More

In this Issue

13 pieces of classic software whose code is now accessible
Last week NASA published a catalog of software code its developed over the years which you can now access for free. While NASA has a history of making technology it develops available to the public, other developers of proprietary software will sometimes also lift the veil on their code. Often, it's years after the software's prime and is usually shared for historical purposes. Occasionally, though, developers will make formerly proprietary code open source to encourage others to continue its development. Here are 13 pieces of classic proprietary software for which the source code is now available, either through being open sourced by its developer or, sometimes, because it was literally rescued from the trash heap by a fan. Read More

2014's 25 Geekiest 25th Anniversaries
Network World's latest edition of the year's "25 Geekiest 25th Anniversaries" includes the launch of the first GPS satellites, Lotus Notes 1.0, Nintendo's Game Boy and SimCity, as well as one of tech's most notorious false alarms: "cold fusion." In addition, the original Doctor Who television series signed off, Doogie Howser got his TV doctor's license and AT&T did something it hadn't done in its 103-year history. Read More

25 ways IT will morph in the next 25 years
Imagine a world where the computers, networks and storage systems are all tens of thousands of times faster than they are today -- and then think about the sci-fi type of applications that will be possible. Read More

25 tech touchstones of the past 25 years
Narrowing down the network industry's top events from the past 25 years is a little like picking your all-time baseball or football moments – something will always get left out and the second-guessers will come out of the woodwork. So what we have here is what for the moment I think are the Top 25 events that had the most influence on, or will have the most impact in the future of the industry. No you won't find mention of OSI in here or the changing of CEOs at Microsoft or even the founding of Apple, just to name a few big events, but you will find TCP/IP, Windows, the iPhone and a host of other key happenings that have shaped the past 25 years. Read More

EXCLUSIVE: Watch Steve Jobs play FDR in Apple's long-lost takeoff on famous '1984' Macintosh TV commercial
If all you want to see is Steve Jobs playfully portraying Franklin Delano Roosevelt - right down to the cigarette holder - here's that short clip before we get to the longer version of the film that it's taken from and an explanation: Read More

The cool art of vintage phone booths
Once ubiquitous to almost any street corner, cell phones have largely rendered phone booths to history's scrap heap. But people are doping some interesting things with the telephone booths that remain. In Brazil for example, they encourage artists to paint the systems with wild colors. In England there's a company that turns the old red boxes into all manner of items – including a shower stall. New York City recently made a bunch of telephone booths into Wi-Fi hotspots. Take a look at some of the cooler colors of the telephone booth. Read More

The (mostly) cool history of the IBM mainframe
In its history the IBM mainframe has been hailed and vilified. It has been born, reborn (many times) and pronounced dead. And yet the Big Iron remains a key computing resource for many large companies and will do so for many years. Here we take a look at the mainframe's long history, from its use with the US space program to its prominence inside large business data centers. Take a look. Read More

Dungeons & Dragons at 40: A history
On Jan. 26, it had been 40 years since the popular role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons was published. Still a geek touchstone a generation on, D&D has had a long and eventful history, and is more than a role-playing game these days. Read More

The Most Mortifying Moments in IT Security History
It might be a data breach or some other failure, but sometimes someone has to stand up and tell it like it is. Here we take a look at some of the most mortifying security gaffes over the past few years. Read More

SLIDESHOWS

10 Big Data startups to watch

These 10 startups to watch were chosen based on third-party validation, experience, and market potential.

JOIN THE NETWORK WORLD COMMUNITIES

As network pros you understand that the value of connections increase as the number of connections increase, the so called network effect, and no where is this more evident than in professional relationships. Join Network World's LinkedIn and Facebook communities to share ideas, post questions, see what your peers are working on and scout out job applicants (or maybe find your next opportunity).

Network World on Facebook

Network World on LinkedIn

MOST-READ STORIES

1. The IRS uses computers?! The horror!

2. First look: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

3. Fortinet, McAfee, Trend Micro, Bitdefender battle in socially-engineered malware prevention test

4. Still deploying 11n Wi-Fi? You might want to think again

5. How users are fixing Windows 8.1 Update install problems

6. 9 Things You Need to Know Before You Store Data in the Cloud

7. Heartbleed bug is irritating McAfee, Symantec, Kaspersky Lab

8. Docker becomes de facto Linux standard

9. Kill switches coming to iPhone, Android, Windows devices in 2015