Monday, August 13, 2001		Newsscape

Last weekend saw the first Vintage Computer Festival East, which was held just outside Boston, reports The Economist. Like its big sister in Silicon Valley, the festival is a celebration of computer history. People come to swap stories and missing parts, as well as to show off their prized computers. A basic part of the festival, trading in vintage computers, is still pretty small-scale, but may not stay that way. Once just a fad for hobbyists, old computers are now being bought as status symbols-and even as investments-at computer festivals and ham-radio fairs, not to mention on auction websites.

In a concept paper, the hardware industry has urged the government to take initiatives to launch a new product from India called "The India PC." According to the paper, where it had outlined the broad strategy for the Indian hardware sector, the India PC should be a low-cost PC with only essential features minus the expensive gizmos, reports Business Standard. "Such a product is needed for the Indian masses (more than 60 per cent in villages) that cannot afford high technology PCs at the higher price," the concept paper points out. The paper also suggests that the India PC could be the first project of Media Lab Asia.

Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in Mumbai has achieved a new milestone in developing a supercomputer 20-25 times faster than the fastest computer built by other institutes in the country. The 84-node Anupam-Pentium Supercomputer can give a sustained speed of 15 giga floating point instructions per second (15,000 million FLOPS). "The 15 gigaflop supercomputer is five times faster than BARC's 16-node Anupam-Pentium supercomputer which has developed in June 2000," BARC Computer Division Head H.K. Kaura has told PTI. "The present supercomputer has been configured using industry standard Pentium-III 600 MHz personal computers," he said.

With the centralised date management system gaining importance in the Internet era, data storage has taken the centrestage, reports The Times of India. According to an IDC report, 75 per cent of the total IT spending in the banking sector will be in data storage by 2003. During 2001, data storage is likely to constitute 50 per cent of the total IT spending as against 25 per cent in 1998-99. Taking cue from here, IT giant Hewlett Packard is focussing in developing and deploying the latest data storage system based on storage area network (SAN). In this, data relating to all the operations are stored on one device that is connected with large number of servers that support various activities like ATM, Internet banking, credit card operation and others. Because all servers are connected with the data simultaneously, the response time is very low.

The Asia Pacific region will overtake the USA as the world's largest pool of Internet subscribers by 2003, reports Reuters, quoting Gartner Dataquest. The research group projects the Asia Pacific region, including Japan, to have 183.3 million Net subscribers in 2003, compared to 162.8 million in the USA. Western Europe will have an estimated 162.2 million users. Asia Pacific, however, will lag behind the USA in terms of Internet access revenue for at least another five years. India is expected to have the highest growth rates in the region with average subscriber growth of 44 per cent a year between 2001 and 2005, Gartner Dataquest said. India will have 21.3 million subscribers by 2005, making it the fourth largest market after China, Japan and South