Volume 41, Number 6 · March 24, 1994
The Computer Wars
By James Fallows
Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in America
by Stephen Manes, by Paul Andrews
Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, 541 pp., $14.00 (paper)
Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing
by Randall E. Stross
Atheneum, 374 pp., $24.00
Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children
by David Sheff
Random, 445 pp., $25.00
Computer Wars: How the West Can Win in a Post-IBM World
by Charles H. Ferguson, by Charles R. Morris
Times Books, 272 pp., $28.00
Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM
by Paul Carroll
Crown, 375 pp., $24.00
The 'computer revolution' of the last twenty years or so is often discussed as if it were a single huge phenomenon. But it has involved many separate technical and business trends moving in different directions at different speeds. The technical change that has had the biggest impact on daily life has been the phenomenal advancement in semiconductor chips over the past fifteen years. The chips, tiny collections of electronic circuits, fall into two large categories: memory chips (which store information) and processors (which carry out instructions about what to do with the information). The central-processing chip that controls one of today's typical personal computers operates about one hundred times as fast as the chip supplied with the original IBM personal computer in 1981. The memory chips on today's typical personal computers can store five hundred times as much information as the original IBM PC did, for about the same price.[1]
Review, 8445 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |