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How the IBM PC Won, Then Lost, the Personal Computer Market

Cars That Think

On 12 August 1981, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in midtown Manhattan, IBM unveiled the company's entrant into the nascent personal computer market: the IBM PC. The personal computer vastly expanded the number of people and organizations that used computers. With that, the preeminent U.S. Press coverage of the announcement was lukewarm.

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Who Really Invented the Thumb Drive?

Cars That Think

Personal computers in the late 1980s began incorporating CD-ROM drives, but initially these could read only from prerecorded disks and could not store user-generated data. And this incremental nature of innovation means that controlling the spread, manufacturing, and further development of new ideas is almost impossible. MB of data.

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The Rise and Fall of 3M’s Floppy Disk

Cars That Think

If you ask the average person what the company 3M does, odds are if they have a few gray hairs hanging out on their scalp, they might say that the company makes floppy disks. military during the war, and the company revisited the idea immediately after. The invention was used by the U.S. That was a harbinger of what was to come.

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IBM’s Fall From World Dominance

Cars That Think

Census, the mainframe computer, legitimizing the person computer, and developing the software that beat the best in the world at chess and then Jeopardy. Joining me to talk about it—and IBM's other pivots, past and future—is a person uniquely qualified to do so. Steven Cherry Jim, IBM wasn't the first to personal computers.

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EAA National Board nominations from across North America

Electric Auto Association

About Marc: Marc has been a long-time advocate of electric vehicles and drives a 2002 Toyota RAV4 EV, 2011 Th!nk Participative leadership, where ideas are followed by action. Personally meeting Sandy Munro to exchange ideas of the future of BEVs. I prefer an open exchange of ideas creating consensus decisions.

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EAA National Board nominations from across North America

Electric Auto Association

About Marc: Marc has been a long-time advocate of electric vehicles and drives a 2002 Toyota RAV4 EV, 2011 Th!nk Participative leadership, where ideas are followed by action. Personally meeting Sandy Munro to exchange ideas of the future of BEVs. I prefer an open exchange of ideas creating consensus decisions.

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Remembering IEEE Spectrum Columnist Bob Lucky

Cars That Think

He retired in 2002. He was a guest on a number of network TV broadcasts including A World of Ideas , where he discussed the impacts of technological advances. On his personal website , he wrote that the book was about “the ways we represent information and the differences between man and machine in the use and processing of bits.