Personal Computers

International Business Machines Corp., in a major move to make it easier for office workers to use its entire lineup of computers, on Tuesday introduced a new series of software that will provide a single set of operating instructions for its most popular models. Although the announcement had been expected for months, several analysts called it an important development because it represents IBM's strongest-ever acknowledgement of the broad role it expects personal computers to play in the office of the future.

Personal computers at home and in the office will soon be displaced by the tablet as the primary computing device, according to a new report from Forrester Research. Tablet sales are expected to grow sharply from 56 million in 2011 to 375 million in 2016, according to the report. Given that most users keep their tablets for three years, there will probably be 760 million tablets in use globally by 2016, said Frank Gillette, principal analyst on Forrester's business technology futures team.

In an ominous new twist to the Pentium chip controversy, computer users in corporations around the world are rushing to establish whether a flaw in the Intel microprocessor may have resulted in miscalculations that could make them vulnerable to lawsuits or trouble from government agencies.

Jack Tramiel, the tough and aggressive Commodore International founder who brought millions of people into the world of personal computers in the late 1970s and early '80s with his low-cost PCs, has died. He was 83. Tramiel, who lived in Monte Sereno, Calif., died Sunday at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto , said his son, Leonard. He had been suffering from congestive heart failure for many years. A Polish-born survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp who began his business career with a typewriter repair shop in the Bronx in the early 1950s, Tramiel (pronounced tra-MELL)

Toshiba America Information Systems Inc., responding to stiff competition in the personal computer market, said Monday that it was cutting the prices of its business and professional notebooks and advanced portable computers. Toshiba's Computer Systems Division, based in Irvine, cut prices as much as 17% on its T6400 advanced portable computers. For example, the price of its top-of-the-line, T6400MM/200 portable computer was cut to $7,999 from $9,599.

There are plenty of options these days for the tedious but essential chore of backing up your PC data. There are tape systems, Zip drives and those new LS-120 drives that work with standard floppies or 120-megabyte removable disks. All of them work fine, but they're not very convenient if you want to use one backup system for several different computers.

The computer retailer said its machine will be compatible with IBM computers and roughly equivalent to the PC AT model. The line of machines will bear its name and that of Wyse Technology, which will manufacture the computers. The chain's announcement precedes by days the anticipated introduction on Monday of rival ComputerLand's own brand of personal computers.

The new computers combine plentiful features with low prices, analysts said, and should put pressure on International Business Machines and makers of IBM PC-compatible computers. Analysts said Tandy's move is a sign that the price war at the low end of the personal computer market is starting to move up the ladder to more sophisticated machines.

Two months after their splashy debut, IBM's new Personal System/2 computers are selling sporadically and are in danger of languishing on dealers' shelves because the software designed for them is not ready, industry analysts said. "They are selling slower than most people had expected," one analyst said. Several analysts said dealers were discounting the PCs and some are selling them into the "gray market," a market where unauthorized vendors cut the prices even more.

Tandon Corp. is to unveil a line of IBM-compatible personal computers today that will be sold in the United States under the Chatsworth company's name. The models, company sources and securities analysts said, will be compatible with IBM's XT and AT models and are similar to ones that Tandon has been selling under its own name in Europe since last fall. Tandon was scheduled to make the announcement at a New York press conference.

If you've ever had your laptop stolen, watched your toddler baptize your PC with Pepsi, or had your MacBook come to a cold, dead stop, you know that the digital memories we store on our home computers are anything but indelible. But now there's a special place coalescing where data never dies: It's called the cloud. Internet giants Google Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook Inc. have relied for years on cloud computing, where information is split up and stored across large networks of remote servers, rather than all in one place.

Jacob E. Goldman, the former Xerox chief scientist who created the company's famed Palo Alto Research Center, whose scientists and engineers invented the modern personal computer in the 1970s and developed an array of other pioneering computing technologies, has died. He was 90. Goldman, a resident of Westport, Conn., died Tuesday at a hospital in nearby Stamford after a short illness, said his son, Melvin. A physicist, Goldman had been the head of the research and development laboratory at Ford Motor Co. before joining Xerox, then based in Rochester, N.Y., as chief scientist in late 1967.

There was a time when Steve Mehta was on his laptop nonstop. Nowadays, he hardly touches it. The 43-year-old attorney uses his tablet computer to highlight legal briefs, take notes for court cases or flip though a digital version of the California probate code. "The laptop is so limited," Mehta he said as he stood against the wall of a crammed Los Angeles subway car, watching an episode of "Modern Family" on his tablet. "But everything you want to do, this thing does. " So long, laptop?

Hewlett-Packard Co., the world's largest maker of personal computers and printers, said Monday that its board had approved an additional $10 billion for share repurchases. The move adds to $4.9 billion already available and will help offset dilution from employee stock purchases, HP said. The company will repurchase at least $3 billion in shares in the fourth quarter ending in October, interim Chief Executive Cathie Lesjak said in a statement. The Palo Alto company is in a bidding war with Dell Inc. for data storage provider 3Par Inc. of Fremont.

When Ray Ozzie, the creator of Lotus Notes, was hired by Bill Gates to be Microsoft Corp.'s chief technical officer five years ago, he warned his new colleagues that the software giant needed to adapt to the Internet — or else. But the company that brought personal computing to the masses in the 1980s and '90s has gone hitless in recent years, and last week it was surpassed by longtime rival Apple Inc. as the world's biggest technology company in stock market value. With no competitive smart phone or tablet computer — and with its Bing search engine slow to gain traction — Microsoft has struggled to keep pace with surging rivals Apple and Google Inc. The company last week also announced the departure of two veteran executives who led efforts to develop its forthcoming smart phones.

When Apple's iPad debuted on April 3, it was greeted in some quarters of the tech world by a chorus of critiques. With no phone, no camera and no multitasking, how could it be revolutionary? And yet, when it comes to the iPad's e-reader, revolutionary is exactly what it might be. It's not just that the iPad is beautiful. Nor is it just that the touch-screen interface is more intuitive than the controls on the plastic shell of the Kindle -- which up to now has been the dominant e-reader.

Lawyers are some of the most eager users of the Internet, commercial online networks, CD-ROMs and electronic mail. They might not strike you as a high-tech lot, but that just goes to show that professions steeped in the liberal arts tradition haven't been able to ignore the onslaught of technology. In a national study conducted this spring by Pitney Bowes Management Service in Stamford, Conn., 94% of lawyers surveyed credited technology with making their law practices more efficient.

Not since biblical times has the arrival of a tablet been greeted with such anticipation. Apple Inc. won't reveal the details of what is widely expected to be a new tablet computer until Wednesday, but it has already shaken up the publishing world, whose executives wonder whether the device will revolutionize the distribution of newspapers, magazines and books in the same way that the iPod transformed the music industry. Fueling widespread speculation, Apple last week invited reporters to "come see our latest creation" but provided no other information.

Netbooks are a bright idea suffering from dim imaginations. In theory, if you took a compact laptop, removed its DVD drive, shrank its keyboard and screen a little, switched to a power-efficient processor and stripped down its software to the minimum necessary for Web work, you'd have a cheap, light machine well suited to everyday errands. In practice, too many netbook manufacturers can't resist shipping models with typo-inducing keyboard layouts, too-small screens and inadequate memory.