As most of you know, netbooks became a fad for a while a couple of years back. With the recession in full force, folks welcomed the chance to buy a small but supposedly fully-equipped Windows note-book for a pittance. Indeed, prices often dipped below $300, although manufacturers soon piled on the features in order to […]

It comes as no surprise that, when the head of a computer company has been portrayed in a movie or TV show, he’s apt to resemble Bill Gates, a nerdy caricature with the tousled hair who engages in evil behavior on a computer to cause havoc. I rather suspect that, when the U.S. Department of […]

Although most of you didn’t get your hands on the Public Beta of Mac OS X until September of 2000, I actually saw it a month earlier. You see, I was working as a Contributing Editor for CNET in those days, and one of Apple’s PR people met me in San Francisco to deliver the […]

Once upon a time, there was a battle to the death between Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. Microsoft made their product leaner and meaner, forced it onto PC desktops, and, in the end, defeated an increasingly bloated rival. On the Mac platform, Microsoft convinced (some say coerced) Apple to make Internet Explorer the default […]