Wrapping Up a Wild Week on the Storage Beat

It sounds kind of strange, but The Station has been doing so much reporting lately that we’re not getting enough writing done. We are so loaded with notes, taped interviews, emails, and information on disks and in personal brain memory that an information explosion is about to take place.

On Monday, The Station caught the 25th anniversary of the Commodore 64 personal computer at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. We got to meet PC pioneers William Lowe (IBM), Steve Wozniak (Apple), Jack Tramiel (Commodore, Atari), and Adam Chowaniec (Commodore, Amiga). Don’t recognize some of those names? Well, let’s compare it to a more familiar genre, baseball: Meetings these guys would be comparable to a baseball fan meeting Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Cy Young, Christy Mathewson and Ty Cobb all at the same time.

A couple of stories about this event will be included in Monday’s edition of eWEEK. Check out “Upfront” and “Spencer F. Katt.”

Tuesday we traipsed over to Seagate Services in Santa Clara and watched actual data being rescued from fried hard drives. You’ll read that story soon in eWEEK, probably next week.

Wednesday we ventured to Sun Microsystems to hear an interesting panel discussion on data privacy and security. The story will post here soon, and if you want to view the entire 60-minute event, you will be able to see it on YouTube.com starting Monday.

Thursday we got a sneak peak at a revolutionary new server rack built by Liquid Computing of Ottawa, Canada. This could seriously change the data center from the inside out over the next few years. Stay tuned.

Today we got a preview of what Intel will be showing at CES next month in Las Vegas. The Station’s story on a new NAND flash storage drive that will be launched is posted now at eWEEK.com.

On another topic: It seems my last post on IBM’s tendency to spin press releases in untrue fashion has caused some discussion among readers (see the previous post). But that’s good; what’s your take on this topic? Do lies and half-truths in public relations mean anything, or are they to just be shrugged off as non-important common practice?

Along these lines, as The Station told a very good and professional media relations person from EMC the other day: Watch it. We’re holding all companies who send us public information to the same standards. Try and lie through your teeth — just try it — The Station will be there to rain shame on you.

We suggest playing it straight. Have a great weekend, all!