[Info-vax] OT: Steve Wozniak

[Neil Rieck]

On Sep 1, 9:52 pm, Sue <susan_skonet... at hotmail.com> wrote:
> On Aug 17, 9:20 pm, Neil Rieck <n.ri... at sympatico.ca> wrote:
>
>
>
> > I, along with 700 others, just had breakfast with Steve Wozniac at a
> > conference sponsored by Waterloo Ontario companies like RIM, Dalsa and
> > Open Text.http://www.communitech.ca/en/
>
> > Boy, I thought I was an optimist but this guy's optimism is
> > overflowing and infectious. Why would you OpenVMS people care about
> > this? The Woz now works for a company called "fusion i/o"http://www.fusionio.com/
> > and he mentioned that big companies, like HP and IBM, are using
> > "fusion i/o" solid-state storage technology to set new TPC transaction
> > records while beating fiber-connected storage arrays by 10 times or
> > more (and costing a whole lot less)
>
> >http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9100218/HP_adding_solid_state_...
>
> > In their view, multi-core CPU processors will only get faster which
> > means that magnetic storage will continue to starve them of data. They
> > feel that solid-state storage will become the primary system memory
> > while hard disks will be relegated to doing off-system backups.
>
> > Now let's see if their vision comes to fruition.
>
> > Neil Rieck
> > Kitchener/Waterloo/Cambridge,
> > Ontario, Canada.http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/
>
> Neil this is very cool, did you have a chance to meet him in person?
> Any guy who plays polo on a segway has to be pretty interesting.
>
> sue

Yes I did meet him.

Steve Wozniak has been a hero to me since 1978 when I purchased an
Apple ][ (not plus) with two 5 1/4" floppy drives and a language card
(to learn Apple Pascal).

I stood in line behind the TV +  newspaper reporters with my hardcover
copy of  "iWoz". After about a half hour I finally got to the head of
the line. He asked me how to autograph it and I asked him to write
"Apple II Forever, WOZ" which got a big laugh from everyone in
earshot. (this will NOT be going on eBay)

This guy's optimism was very infectious. More than 700 people attended
the Communitech breakfast. They asked for a show of hands (who
develops hardware? who develops software? who develops both?). When it
turned out that more than two thirds of the audience were engineers
and/or programmers, they replaced their non-technical vanilla speeches
with more-technical versions (the person sitting next to me was
convinced that the phrases "Northbridge" and "Southbridge" were made
up).

Anyway, the Woz really surprised the audience when he mentioned that
Fusion-io was working with HP and IBM to help them break new
transacation processing records -AND- that yhey already had commercial
drivers written for Solaris. BTW, no one is saying this is the end of
magnetic storage, but it may be the beginning of the end. (who would
have ever thought that computing would be possible without magnetic
cores?)

Neil Rieck
Kitchener/Waterloo/Cambridge,
Ontario, Canada.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/