Stories about: MITS

The year is 1975. Gerald Ford is in the White House, South Vietnam falls, Muhammad Ali defeats Joe Frazier in the "Thrilla in Manila" world championship boxing match, the late-night comedy show NBC's Saturday Night (later called Saturday Night Live) debuts, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest sweeps the Oscars, and Captain & Tennille's "Love Will Keep Us Together" and Glenn Campbell's "Rhinestone Cowboy" top the music charts.

Max Burnet has turned his home in the leafy suburbs of Sydney into arguably Australia’s largest private computer museum. Since retiring as director of Digital Equipment Corporation a decade ago, Burnet has converted his interest in the computing industry into an invaluable snapshot of computer history. Every available space from his basement to the top floor of his two-storey home is covered with relics from the past. His collection is vast, from a 1920s Julius Totalisator, the first UNIX PDP-7, a classic DEC PDP-8, the original IBM PC, Apple’s Lisa, MITS Altair 8800, numerous punch cards and over 6000 computer reference books. And more. He happily opened his doors for CIO to take a look.

For more than 30 years he has roamed among us, a strange hybrid of Napoleon Dynamite and Vlad the Impaler. Nerdy yet ruthless, brilliant yet hobbled by blind spots regarding his company's failings, Bill Gates leaves an indelible mark on everything digital. Yet on June 27, he'll step down from his day-to-day duties at Microsoft to devote himself to philanthropic activities.

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates formally entered the computer business in 1975 as a gangly geek and later this month will semi-exit as an industry luminary leaving behind a billion-dollar juggernaut and a legacy of software, personal computing, innovation, and tough and sometimes unfair competition.

These former technology luminaries have all taken different paths. How different? One's a country doctor, one's a budding movie mogul, and one teaches toddlers--and he's not even alive.

It's not like he needs it to beef up his resume, but the world's richest college dropout is finally getting his degree.

The IBM PC is 25. And here are the top PCs ever, from machines you owned and loved to systems you've never heard of.

Here's PC World's official (and entirely idiosyncratic) list of the top tech gadgets of the last half century.

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. launched a wireless handheld device in South Korea Monday that combines a phone, a TV, a camera, and a camcorder in what is the beginning of a line of feature-packed gadgets that the company plans to roll out this year.

The first CeBIT show in America may be all work and little play, but plenty of business-savvy gadgets abound at this confab hosted by the German conventioneer.