Terminal Man

Ed Roberts died yesterday in Georgia. He was the founder of MiTS, the designer of the Altair 8800 and as close to being the father of the American personal computer as anyone can get. I say the American personal computer because French readers constantly correct me on this. Where, again, are all those French computer companies?

I knew Ed Roberts, though not very well. I never worked for or with him but I met him many times even years after he gave up computers for medicine in his late 30’s. That transition from digital hardware to medicine is key to Ed’s story and I think provides the crux of this column, which is […]

By |April 3rd, 2010|2010|71 Comments
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Why Your Favorite App Isn't Yet Available on the iPad

Update — The very real problem with the iPad simulator described below is affecting hundreds of developers and turns out to be an artifact of a documentation error by Apple.  Literally what should have been a ‘>’ was made a ‘<‘ by mistake (or vice versa).  The result is that some applications were built in a way that was within the tolerance of the simulator but not of the target hardware.  Now that iPads are coming available the solutuion is simple: test your app on the actual device.

It’s iPad Day and the fanboys and girls are out with their credit cards buying the non-3G, non-GPS early model iPads that go on sale […]

By |April 2nd, 2010|2010|41 Comments
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A Tale of Two H1-Bs

A friend for many years who happens to be chief financial officer for a Silicon Valley startup has this story to tell about his immigration problems at work:

This is the immigration battle that I fight day-in and day-out.  How do we attract the best and brightest to our shores (H1-B visas) so the jobs stay in America instead of transferring overseas?  The technologists that we work with could work anywhere.  We have to make it easy for them to come here and to contribute here and to have bright babies here and to have those babies set higher standards here.  I see very, very few Smiths or Joneses or Johnsons who contribute […]

By |March 31st, 2010|2010|195 Comments
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Collaborize, Rinse, Repeat

I’d been putting-off going to startups.cringely.com to finally read all 286 entries so far in this summer’s Cringely (NOT in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour.  But when I finally went to the site, I couldn’t get in.  The page timed-out.  This was not good.  Or maybe it was very good in that the site was so busy.  But even that’s not good because I don’t like turning readers away.  So which was it — good or not good?

Not good.

Twelve hours later, when I still couldn’t get in I called the CTO at the company that hosts that site — Democrasoft.  You haven’t heard about them, believe me, and I’ll […]

By |March 23rd, 2010|2010|72 Comments
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What He Said: Cisco Steps Up Its Router Game

Last week Cisco Systems made a big product announcement that the networking giant said would change the Internet forever. What could it be? Well it was a big router, a really big router that would allow more bits than ever to flow over the world’s fiber backbones. And the market yawned, because bits are a commodity and it is hard to tell a million bushels of wheat in a pile from two million bushels of wheat. And Cisco’s enterprise customers — its biggest business customers — have plenty of bandwidth already, thanks.

Well that’s the entire point: corporations, where T1‘s still dominate, use less bandwidth per person than we do at our house, […]

By |March 15th, 2010|2010|65 Comments
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