My mother just informed me that her greyhound Dawnie was diagnosed with an osteosarcoma today, and had to be euthanized.  She had been in pain since late last week, and although it’s possible that she could have been kept alive for a few more weeks, it would have just been more weeks of pain.  Mom [...]

In 1955 at IBM, Alan Shugart was a member of the team that developed the world’s first hard drive, the IBM RAMAC, which stored about five megabytes on fifty 24-inch platters. He also directed the development of the first floppy disk drive. Upon leaving IBM, he cofounded Shugart Associates to manufacture floppy disk [...]

R.I.P. Syd Barrett, 6 January 1946 — 7 July 2006
Shine on, you crazy diamond!

John Morressy, author and retired english professor, was perhaps best known for his stories of the wizard Kedrigern. Hardly a month went by without one of his short stories appearing in F&SF or other magazines.

Since the late 1970s I’ve been a fan of Alan Kotok’s work as one of the architects of the PDP-6 and PDP-10. At the PDP-1 celebration at the Computer History Museum this past May 15, I had the great privilege of finally meeting him and speaking with him for a few minutes. I [...]

“I believe that when we leave a place a part of it goes with us and part of us remains. Go anywhere in these halls, when it is quiet, and just listen. After a while you will hear the echoes of all of our conversations, every thought and word we’ve exchanged. Long after we are [...]

I just heard the sad news about Weird Al Yankovic’s parents.