PC World Business

September is usually too early to draw year-end conclusions, but I'll go out on a limb to say that 2008 will be remembered as a key year for SSDs (solid-state drives) -- not so much for sales figures, which won't likely reflect the hype surrounding flash SSDs this year, but for the technology itself, which remains one of the most controversial to hit storage in recent times.

In one of the final scenes of the movie, "Charlie Wilson's War," the story of America's part in Afghanistan's victory over the Soviet Union, Congressman Wilson is shown asking for more funding to rebuild Afghanistan, a request that is denied.

Patrick Gelsinger is an electrical engineer. He joined Intel in 1979, worked on the design of the 80286 and 80386 microprocessors, and was the chief architect for the 80486 chip.

When a British study recently showed the average computer keyboard is dirtier than a toilet seat, Jacqueline Miller's worst suspicions were confirmed.

Mary Lou Jepsen stirred up a controversy when she left the struggling One Laptop Per Child nonprofit effort in December to start her own for-profit company, Pixel Qi, with the goal to create a US$75 laptop using technologies she invented at OLPC.

Microsoft co-founder and Chairman Bill Gates has been giving keynote speeches at Las Vegas conventions, including the Consumer Electronics Show and the now-defunct Comdex, for decades. Before his last CES keynote speech as a full-time company employee, he talked with the IDG News Service about his legacy as an innovator, the background behind some of the deals announced at CES this week and directions for Microsoft.

Long before geeks were cool - and rich - a group of engineers and computer scientists had to build the first machines that would ignite the personal computer revolution and ultimately change the way people communicate, play and do business.

For much of his 34 years at Intel, Justin R. Rattner has been a pioneer in parallel and distributed processing. His early ideas didn't catch on in the market, but the time has come for them now, he recently told Computerworld's Gary Anthes.

Why would a business that focussed on technology recovery, refurbishing and resale, want to re-brand itself? Ask TechTurn, once called Newmarket IT, who felt that its service - diverting potential IT scrap from e-waste to usable technology, or IT salvage - was an idea whose time had come.

Twenty-one year old John Leung was awarded a $US25,000 first prize by Bill Gates himself last week, in Microsoft's annual Next-Gen PC Design Competition. An undergraduate architecture student at the University of Melbourne, Leung's MADE in China submission took a novel approach to computing products and services, with the aim of bringing PCs to the emerging Chinese market.

When plans to build and distribute a $US100 (£50) laptop to schoolchildren in emerging economies were first announced two years ago, the people behind the scheme had their fair share of critics.