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Like many manufacturing firms, Gillette has been slow to incorporate personal computers into its operationS. Although the well-known razor-blade manufacturer has offices scattered throughout the world, it has only about [...]

The unsinkable ship. The rustproof car. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The mainframe-linked database. Most microcomputer databases, whether equipped with an easy query language, armed [...]

Most apparent in the evoluation of television was the size, quality and appearance of the screen. The improved technology--better transmitting, receiving and decoding circuitry--that supported the bigger screen was largely [...]

Kerthunk! ThwopThwopThwop... To most any auto-driving American, the sound of a flat tire is as familiar as Michael Jackson's voice on the car radio. And for 25 million drivers, the [...]

Word processing--the first application of the information age that unfolded with microcomputers--may become that age's first extinction. That was the concern of some vendors as more integrated-software packages cropped up [...]

FINANCIAL PLANNING SOFTWARE Financial-planning software is a curious, in-between breed of the software species. It may be a spreadsheet, but one that lacks the expansive capabilities of SuperCalc or 1-2-3. [...]

It's the 'pareve' stamped on a pack of crackers in the supermarket, or the UL tag clipped onto a lamp cord. It means that this product meets exacting standards, has [...]

Eventually, the trials and tribulations caused by incompatible networks will be overcome, the blue-sky theorists often claim. The esoteric links between mainframes and micros will be as commonplace as a [...]

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, a landgrant agricultural and engineering school, sits snugly in a hollow of the Blue Ridge mountains. Public transportation is limited to the Greyhound bus [...]

Shopping for compatibles, until recently, was like trying to distinguish between different bars of soap. By their nature, IBM-compatible PCs must be very similar, and little was done to distinguish [...]

The worst thing in the world is if a broker calls and says, 'Hey, I know I should be owning a personal computer. I don't know what to use it [...]

The summer of 1984 may go down as the summer of integrated software. Many new integrated packages were released this season and while Symphony and Framework bounded out of the [...]

Here's your platter-spinning papa sendin' the best of the business buzzwords Top 40 right at ya. And this week on the charts, 'teleconferencing' jumped up from number 10 to number [...]

graphics BOARDS Choose the 'Middleman' That Will Tie Together Your PC-Based Graphics Software and Your Monitor Configuration There's a cautionary childhood tale that begins with the loss of a horseshoe [...]

Accountants using PCs require audit trails in their software. But it is the edit trail that concerns textbook editors at Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. in Reading, MA, and the lack of [...]

Although most IBM PCs are sold as stripped-down models, multifunction boards that plug into the micro have created a rainbow of possibilities for expanding and customizing these systems. Boards that [...]

Support for Sale It used to be that when you bought a software package you also bought a knowledgeable person at the other end of a telephone line who could [...]

Micro-to-Mainframe Links A useful micro-to-mainframe link is more than just a terminal-emulation board and a length of coax cable, more than a modem linked to the mainframe. It is only [...]

There is good news and bad news for purchasers of dot-matrix printers. The good news is that printer prices have been dropping rapidly in recent months and the price erosion [...]

Buying all the microcomputers needed to accomplish a company's information-management goals can be a heavy financial burden. But just as many companies have met their transportation needs through fleet-leasing, it [...]

If selling microcomputers is a lucrative market, then repairing those untold thousands of PCs already installed stands to be just as rewarding. And because these PCs, in many cases, have [...]

The link between mainframe DP shops and microcomputer users has long looked as tenuous as the relationship between Superman and Lois Lane. The potential was enormous; the potential problems were [...]

The halls are lined with mirrors and bright red, patterned wallpaper. On the floor, hundreds of people mill about, slipping quarters into slot machines or putting chips on squares labeled [...]

Don Wilson's pride and joy is 2 megabytes large, recalculates during breakfast and spends its spare time projecting possible futures for Ramada Inns, one of the country's largest hotel chains. [...]

They were the Model Ts of the computer world--bulky, costly and recalcitrant. But they have become absolutely indispensable for large applications. Mass-storage devices--hard disks that can store a 5,000-record mailing [...]

Jim Dupuis was a man in a hurry. As safety director for Public Service of New Hampshire (PSNH), he had little more than three months to uncover and report on [...]

Inside a large, low building just south of Tampa, FL, eight members of the Big Eight accounting firm Price Waterhouse are discussing business. But they aren't talking about trails or [...]

Network Operating Systems In the bitter war that has been waged over local area networks (LANs) in the past few years, much of the battle has been concentrated on the [...]

Visa U.S.A. and Visa International Over 130 million consumers purchase goods with a piece of plastic, then tote their packages home and wait for their monthly statements to arrive. Unless [...]

From the simplest ribbon-cable connection between two serial ports to a campuswide local area network (LAN), most computer-to-computer communications have one thing in common: their data travels along wires. And [...]

Desktop organizers might be called the poor man's integrated software. Like Symphony, Framework and their companions, desktop-organizer software attempts to put a variety of functions at the fingertips of the [...]

MITRE CORPORATION POs HAVE BEEN RECRUITED TO SUPPORT CLASSIFIED RESEARCH FOR NATIONAL DEFENSE To the casual visitor, the headquarters of MITRE Corp. in Bedford, MA, resembles a small-town college campus. [...]

PC FURNITURE When the editors at PC Week came up with the project, I almost did a back flip. 'A buyers guide to what?' I said. Simple. Computer furniture. My [...]

Integrated or Stand-Alone Finding the Right Blend The micros of yesterday simply weren't capable of handling today's integrated spreadsheets. Prior to the introduction of the PC, the majority of microcomputers [...]

Anyone who has picked out an auto from the used-car lot instead of the showroom floor knows the myriad gremlins often hidden behind a new paint job and some fast [...]

SATELLITE DATA LINKS Cost is down, reliability up, but security is a deep-dish problem They should have seen it coming. In April, a video pirate calling himself 'Captain Midnight' overpowered [...]

BRIDGING THE COMMUNICATIONS GAP When the Corporation for Open Systems (COS), a company formed to develop manufacturer-independent networking products, admitted Eastman Kodak and Boeing Computer Services as members in February, [...]

The New AT&T 'We in the Bell System believe our business is better served, the public is better served, by strong regulation than it is by weak regulation.' --former AT&T [...]

Microcomputer manufacturers Digital Equipment Corp. and AT&T loom large among the clients of accounting firm Coopers & Lybrand. But in at least part of the company, the IBM PC is [...]

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MEETS PRACTICALITY Experience has shown that, if a corporation's goal is to produce a usable product, the combination of artificial intellgience (AI) and academic research is not the [...]

DESKTOP PUBLISHING Every year, it seems, the microcomputing industry trots out a new 'great white hope'--a technology that's endowed with the power to transform the way PCs are used. The [...]

PC DATA COMMUNICATIONS In 1979, the most effective communications device microcomputer users had at their disposal was a 300 bits-per-second (bps) modem that slowly oozed data down a dial-up telephone [...]