CS361: Operating System

Matt Davenport - Computerworld 1990

Headlines

• Jammed printer causes $550,000 in lottery winnings
• Biometric systems widening
• Heavy competition of database system companies
• Voice recognition beginning research
• OS/2 heavily advertised
• Apples becoming more "grown up" computers
• Windows 3.0 released

Hardware

• New HP models (4/8MB RAM) 8k-40k
• 3 1/2" floppy cleared market dominance
• HP Laserjets deemed "personal printers" at rate of $1495
• EKG Replacement (Cherne Digital Cardiac Diagnostic System)
• Cray-3 Supercomputer prototype (16 cores) / Kraken is a Cray XT5 (112896 cores)
• Intel releases 50MHz chip (cools to 0 C)

Software

• Oracle named top company
• Professional Productivity Corp. E-mail Client $495/8 users
• "Photorealistic" rendering of images

Jobs

• Programmers/Analysts 35k-60k
• Bachelor's in CS
• Cobol / C
• Oracle
• Business Systems Operations $25k-$50k
• Cobol and C most popular with C gaining popularity
• Traces of FORTRAN jobs

Social/Legal

• Robert Morris Trial Began: Disabled ~6,200 computers with a worm starting Nov 2, 1988
• Can technology replace human teachers?