Personal Computer

Unisys Corp. yesterday said that it would introduce a top-of-the-line personal computer based on emerging industry standards for hardware and software. The features of the new machine, which is expected to reach the market in the fourth quarter, are similar to those of IBM's new generation of PCs, unveiled in April. The new Unisys machine will use the powerful 80386 microprocessor made by Intel Corp. and Operating System/2 (OS/2) software supplied by Microsoft Corp. IBM chose the same microprocessor and software for the top models in its new line of PCs, the Personal System/2 series.

Beginning in March, IA/Buckley Corp. had just eight months to rebuild a six-mile stretch of the Schuylkill Expressway between Manayunk and Conshohocken. The project involved about 1,800 discrete tasks, including tearing up sections of roadway, building forms for bridge decks and laying concrete. On any day, more than two dozen crews, employed both by IA/Buckley and by its 18 subcontractors, would be at work on jobs up and down the section. To finish on time, all those tasks and all those contractors would have to dovetail perfectly.

To better understand why you need a personal computer, let's take a look at the pathetic mess that you call your life. We'll start with your so-called "financial records," which I'm guessing consist of a cardboard box marked "Taxes" overflowing with random pieces of paper, including movie-ticket stubs from the original "Rocky. " I used to be disorganized like you. But now I have a computer, so instead of an overflowing cardboard box marked "Taxes," I have an overflowing cardboard box marked "Quicken.

It takes more than cartoon-character sheets to make children's bedrooms truly accommodating, though emotional and psychological factors often take a backseat to playful decorating. But whether you're building a new house or remodeling an old one, planning rooms for children is serious business. Children's behavior can be influenced by their bedrooms - the size of the room, the number of children sharing it, and where it is located relative to the master bedroom. Given the frenetic schedules of today's young families, serious thought should be given to how children's bedrooms contribute to or detract from interaction between members of a household.

You shiver with dread when thinking about them. When near one, your heart pounds and your palms sweat. Yet not knowing how to use them makes you feel inadequate and outmoded, a technological hillbilly in a brave new world, a Fred or Wilma Flintstone in the age of the Jetsons. You're not alone. Computers today are omnipresent, and so are people who are afraid of them. There are more than 60 million personal computers in this country, two times more than in 1986, according to InfoCorp, a market research firm in Santa Clara, Calif.

Former U.S. Sen. from Pennsylvania Harris Wofford, director of AmeriCorps, the national service network, visited Simon Gratz High School yesterday to applaud volunteer work and community service. Here he is watching Maurice Allen, a Gratz junior, repair a personal computer.

A Montgomery County lawyer, a burglary victim last month, was facing criminal charges himself yesterday thanks to a tip to police from the burglars. Lower Merion Township police said the lawyer, Brian P. Cleere, 49, and his wife, Carol Cleere, 47, were charged with falsely reporting a burglary at their Penn Valley home to collect homeowners' insurance for a personal computer stolen from the lawyer's uninsured office in Wynnewood. Police said the report of a June 16 burglary at the couple's home in the 1300 block of North Woodbine Avenue became suspect two weeks ago when two Philadelphia men confessed to stealing a $4,000 personal computer from Cleere's office in the Wynnewood Shopping Center.

Jacob E. Goldman, 90, a physicist who as Xerox's chief scientist founded its vaunted Palo Alto Research Center, which invented the modern personal computer, died of congestive heart failure Tuesday in Westport, Conn. Emblematic of a time when American corporations invested heavily in basic scientific research, Mr. Goldman played an important role both at Ford Motor Co., during the 1950s and at Xerox, in the 1960s and 1970s, in financing basic scientific research to try to spark corporate innovation.

Jack Tramiel, 83, a hard-charging, cigar-chomping tycoon whose inexpensive, immensely popular Commodore computers helped ignite the personal computer industry the way Henry Ford's Model T kick-started the mass production of automobiles, died Sunday in Palo Alto, Calif. The cause was heart failure, his son Sam said. Commodore rose to prominence in the 1970s and '80s, producing the first computer to sell a million units. Another model, the Commodore 64, sold more than 20 million units - four times the sales of the Apple II, which is often said to have established the personal computer market.

There is this machine on my desk still called, quaintly, a PC. It is faster and looks sleeker than its predecessors of 20 years ago, but the basic parameters of the hardware haven't changed much since the personal computer was first conceived: keyboard and screen, central processor and main memory, disk storage, and, by 1983, a mouse. Even the operating system is still based on principles that an engineer working in, say, 1978 would recognize. What has changed, oddly, is the notion of the human being working at the machine.

Jack Tramiel, 83, a hard-charging, cigar-chomping tycoon whose inexpensive, immensely popular Commodore computers helped ignite the personal computer industry the way Henry Ford's Model T kick-started the mass production of automobiles, died Sunday in Palo Alto, Calif. The cause was heart failure, his son Sam said. Commodore rose to prominence in the 1970s and '80s, producing the first computer to sell a million units. Another model, the Commodore 64, sold more than 20 million units - four times the sales of the Apple II, which is often said to have established the personal computer market.

Jacob E. Goldman, 90, a physicist who as Xerox's chief scientist founded its vaunted Palo Alto Research Center, which invented the modern personal computer, died of congestive heart failure Tuesday in Westport, Conn. Emblematic of a time when American corporations invested heavily in basic scientific research, Mr. Goldman played an important role both at Ford Motor Co., during the 1950s and at Xerox, in the 1960s and 1970s, in financing basic scientific research to try to spark corporate innovation.

While I am very sensitive to consumer protection and the difficulty many consumers have with their computer systems, I believe that the proposed Computer Lemon Law for Pennsylvania (House Bill 2284) would be bad for both the consumer and the computer industry. I opposed the original bill in 1999 in testimony before the House Committee on Consumer Affairs. I argued then that we were too early in the product development for such lofty expectations. In that the personal computer was about 20 years old at that time, I likened it to the automobile in the age of the Model T. "Imperfection is the price we pay for innovation," I told the committee.

Federal agents this week served City Councilman Rick Mariano with a wide-ranging subpoena for e-mails from his personal computer account with the city, among other records, City Hall officials confirmed last night. Mariano was in his fifth-floor City Hall office when the agents arrived, according to sources familiar with the visit, and was handed the subpoena. It was unclear last night whether federal authorities removed anything from the office. The usually easygoing Mariano, a Democrat who represents the Seventh District, encompassing portions of North Philadelphia, declined to comment last night, saying only: "This is my life.

There is much less profit to be had in making personal computers than there used to be - witness PC pioneer IBM's announcement yesterday that it was bowing out of the game, selling its personal-computing business to Beijing-based Lenovo Group Ltd. for $1.75 billion. With the move, International Business Machines Corp. continued a long march away from sales of consumer hardware and toward supplying more lucrative software and services to businesses. "The PC segment of the industry continues to take on characteristics of the home and consumer electronics industry, which favors enormous economies of scale and a focus on individual users and buyers," IBM chief executive officer Samuel J. Palmisano said in a statement yesterday.

It takes more than cartoon-character sheets to make children's bedrooms truly accommodating, though emotional and psychological factors often take a backseat to playful decorating. But whether you're building a new house or remodeling an old one, planning rooms for children is serious business. Children's behavior can be influenced by their bedrooms - the size of the room, the number of children sharing it, and where it is located relative to the master bedroom. Given the frenetic schedules of today's young families, serious thought should be given to how children's bedrooms contribute to or detract from interaction between members of a household.

There is this machine on my desk still called, quaintly, a PC. It is faster and looks sleeker than its predecessors of 20 years ago, but the basic parameters of the hardware haven't changed much since the personal computer was first conceived: keyboard and screen, central processor and main memory, disk storage, and, by 1983, a mouse. Even the operating system is still based on principles that an engineer working in, say, 1978 would recognize. What has changed, oddly, is the notion of the human being working at the machine.

For one week, the gloves have come off. With some office-supply chains reporting that computer sales increased by up to 30 percent so far this week, Pennsylvania officially is battling its tax-free neighbor - Delaware - by stripping its 6 percent sales tax from personal computer purchases. "We had people come in first thing Sunday morning," said Howard Sowden, general manager of Staples in Exton. "We've had a sharp upturn in sales - about 30 percent over this time last week.

In her small office at Lockheed Martin Management & Data Systems in King of Prussia, Jayne McGinnis keeps meticulous records on certain employees, including personal details such as spouses' names, credit card numbers, and hobbies of family members. Employees eagerly give her the information because McGinnis is not some gatekeeper for high-level security clearance. She is the go-to person when Lockheed Martin employees need to plan vacations, buy gifts, or even organize parties for their families.

The emperor may have no clothes, but he is still the emperor. And so last week, just two days after a federal judge ruled that Microsoft had illegally undercut its rivals, ruthlessly squashed competition, and thrown up roadblocks to innovations that would have broadened consumers' choices, chairman Bill Gates boldly turned up at the White House to play out his starring role in a presidential conference on technology and the world economy....