PC World scraps the floppy disk

Floppy disks, the once iconic devices, will no longer be stocked by major retailer PC World once current supplies run out. 'The sound of a computer's floppy disk drive will be as closely associated with 20th century computing as the sound of a computer dialling in to the Internet,' said Bryan Magrath, commercial director of PC World. Introduced in 1971 by IBM, the first floppy - an eight-inch plastic disk - was invented by Alan Shugart and held just 100KB of data. ...more

Video footage challenges BT's hyperlink patent

BT's attempt to patent the hyperlink has been seriously undermined by video footage of a 1968 research project that predates BT's claim by eight years. The footage, discovered on a Web site by US-based Internet Patent News Service, is of a 90-minute presentation to about 1,000 people in San Francisco by Douglas Englebart, of the Stanford Research Institute. He demonstrated not only hyperlink technology, but also the first computer mouse and a form of videoconferencing. ...more

Famus worm emerges, spreading infections in two languages

There's a bilingual worm on the loose, according to Sophos. While it's unlikely to garner the infamy of Sasser, the security company says it has received numerous reports of Famus-A, as well as of variants B and C. It is not as sophisticated as some versions of Sober, which sent emails in either German or Engish, depending on the recipient's domain, but includes both Spanish and English text in the mail, and includes the attachment PentagonSecret. ...more

Hypertransport Consortium sets out the future for CPU comms

The Hypertransport Consortium has set out its vision for the future of the technology in three white papers on its website. HyperTransport is a board level connection specification that provides up to 22.4GB/sec aggregate bandwidth between either CPU to I/O or CPU to CPU. ...more

IBM launches new mainframe range

IBM went back to its roots yesterday and rolled out a new line of mainframe computers. The new System z9 line of computers concentrates on key security and virtualisation features. The new machines can process up to one billion transactions per day, double the performance of the Series z990, and process up to 6,000 secure online handshakes per second, around three times as many as the previous generation. ...more