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What makes the IBM PC so significant in the history of personal computing? Its impact goes far beyond being a simple product – it's a symbol of standardization and accessibility that reshaped the industry for decades to come. Think of this in today's terms... what differentiates a gaming desktop from a home console? Is it the ability to choose any parts and peripherals you want? Or perhaps the support for games created decades before the computer itself? In the past, the main difference would be a keyboard. A typical early-1980s computer. Image: Miles Bintz These days, Apple is the only...

The Internet Archive has opened a new collection dubbed the Malware Museum that lets you run old DOS-era viruses in your web browser. There are 78 samples to play with, all uploaded earlier today and collated by Mikko Hypponen and Jason Scott. The cheesy old code is executed in your browser using a JavaScript version of emulator DOSbox. Much to our delight, there some classics in the museum, particularly Casino. Running these cyber-fossils will take you back to the bad old days when code could do anything it liked on machines -- security wasn't a consideration at all. As such,...

Project Veritas has released its third undercover video of another Common Core executive revealing the political ideology behind the national educational standards. And this time the anti-American agenda is made clear. The featured Common Core salesperson in this video is Kim Koerber of National Geographic Education (funded by the Gates Foundation, by the way) and a former Pearson Education publishing executive. Her expressions of hatred for America's founding documents coupled with her undying love for Common Core brings the problem to an entirely new level. Plus, she brings a new meaning to the word disgust when talking about those...

In the largest award of its kind in the US, ousted InfoSpace chief Naveen Jain has been ordered to pay $247 million to the company that he founded as penalty for violating laws against "short swing trading". The order by a federal judge is a body blow for a man who took his Seattle-based Internet company to great heights in a space of four years before it crashed like most of its peers during the dotcom bust. The company board fired Jain last December. But Jain, who went ahead and founded Intelius after the ouster, is not giving up just...

MS-DOS is 30 years old today. Well, kind of. On 27 July 1981, Microsoft gave the name MS-DOS to the disk operating system it acquired on that day from Seattle Computer Products (SCP), a hardware company owned and run by a fellow called Rod Brock. SCP developed what it at various times called QDOS and 86-DOS to run on a CPU card it had built based on Intel's 8086 processor.Command line: MS-DOS 1.19 still running after all these years The company had planned to use Digital Research's CP/M-86 operating system, then still in development. But, having released the card in...

With Windows 95's Debut, Microsoft Scales Heights of Hype By David Segal Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, August 24, 1995; Page A14 You can hide under a bridge, row a boat to the middle of the ocean or wedge yourself under the sofa, cover your ears and then hum loudly. But get near a newspaper, radio, television or computer retailer today and you will experience the multimillion-dollar hype surrounding the launch of Windows 95. Microsoft Corp. is spending about $300 million to trumpet the arrival of Windows 95, an upgraded operating system, the software that tells the machinery inside your...

Suit may revise chapter on tech history: Origins of MS-DOS Software's creator disputes book's description of it being a 'rip-off' A decades-old quarrel over a defining event in computer history -- the creation of the program that propelled Microsoft to dominance -- has suddenly become a legal dispute that could lead to a public trial. Tim Paterson, the programmer widely credited for the software that became Microsoft's landmark operating system, MS-DOS, filed a defamation suit this week against prominent historian and author Harold Evans and the publishers of his book, "They Made America," released last year. At issue is...

My daughter's PC needs to last about another 2 years (PC Clone, 128 Meg memory, 600+ MHz, couple dozen gig's left on the hard drives). It's now Win98SE, but several functions and programs are obviously corrupt .... MS isn't supporting Win98 anymore, so I need to replace the op system. Typical use is college homework/family internet and email/games/CD's, and movie clips ... Which op sys is better, given that I've got both XP-Home and Win2000 available?