Back in the day (circa 1990s), I managed to get my hands on one of these babies. It was the IBM PS/2 P70 386 Laptop Portable Computer 8573-121 Rare Vintage (you can buy it for $600!). What was so great about that, you might ask?! First off, it was very powerful at the time, as powerful as most PC desktops. It had an orange plasma screen, which not only was kinda cool, but also alot bigger than the monitors on other portables of the day, like Compaqs.  It ran OS/2, not DOS or Windows 3.1. And back then, I could dial into the recently set up IBM internal network and work from off site locations, like home. I could work on it all day then lug it home and work some more.

I think it weighed around 40 pounds. After a summer of carrying it back and forth from work, my shoulder muscles were actually bigger than they were before I got it!

A great machine.

You can buy one of the original Think pads – no monitor, keyboard, or silicon anything – from the IBM Logo Merchandise Store. It looks like the ones given to new employees many years ago, albeit in a new and cooler black cover. When I joined IBM, everyone was given one of these as a reminder of what you were supposed to do. Awesome.

Fortran is great. For those of you not so old, you might find this particularly difficult to believe. If so, I recommend this article, FORTRAN, by Grady Booch, written up as part of IBM’s Centennial celebrations.

The article is well worth a read, but I would like to add my two cents. Before Fortran, if you wanted to program a computer, you had to write in assembly language. For computer programmers, this may have not been a big deal, but even for them it would be time consuming. What was magic about Fortran was that an engineer, scientist or mathematician could take their formula and their data and easily code it in a language that looked similar to what they were doing with pencil and paper. It made sense.

Don’t forget, back then, much of computing was doing calculations and processing data. It wasn’t word processing or email or anything text based. It was numbers and math. Fortran made all that easier. It made computers more accessible.

Part of the great history of computing is the expansion of use. Key pieces of technology have enabled more people to climb on the bandwagon of computing and take advantage of it. Fortran is one of those key pieces of technology.

While the opinions expressed here and do not represent IBM, I think I stand with alot of IBM employees when I say that I am proud to be associated with the work of others within IBM on the Fortran language. Hat’s off to John Backus and all the people who came with him and after to develop the Fortran language!

(Image is of The Fortran Automatic Coding System for the IBM 704 (October 15, 1956), the first Programmer’s Reference Manual for Fortran, from the Wikipedia entry on Fortran )

Now this comes from Nancy’s Pelosi’s flickr stream, but still, the data comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The direction it is going in is a good one. Now if it could only increase further and faster.

Private Employers Have Added 1.5 Million Jobs In 12 Months

This is incredible and impressive. Using a virtual machine, this video shows the upgrade of a single machine from the original Windows all the way up to Windows 7! Remarkably, most settings hold over all that time!

I love this video, since I have been using PCs since before DOS. Indeed, I can remember DOS 5 being advanced.

Here’s a link to the video: Upgrading through every version of windows