A testament of prophecy, true belief, go-getting and megabucks Stop. Before proceeding: a test. A kind of measured mile on the long road to high-tech heaven. There are only a couple of questions. Either: a> "What will a computer do for me?"; b> "Do I really need a personal computer?"; or c>—the beginner's question—"What are these things anyway?" A bonus: there are no penalties for wrong answers. The weight of the argument and the heat of the debate are what ...

They oohed as animated football players threw one another to the ground. They ahhed as vividly colored martial artists gouged each other's eyes. The crowd huddled around ultrathin TVs earlier this month at the Metreon, a four-story Sony entertainment palace in San Francisco, was getting a sneak preview of Sony's much-touted PlayStation2. And they were loving it. But this Sony-sponsored launch party was hardly a tough audience. Many of the well-dressed game gawkers were actually foot soldiers in the Sony ...

We'll never know what it was like to be aboard Air France Flight 447 as it plunged into the Atlantic Ocean on May 31, apparently killing all 228 aboard. For now, the closest we may get is listening to the passengers on a similar Airbus 330 jet whose flight computer put it into an uncommanded dive over northwestern Australia last October. Qantas Flight 72 had been airborne for three hours, flying uneventfully on autopilot from Singapore to Perth, ...

The new portable computers are handy chips off the old block Last summer, when Adam Osborne, former computer columnist turned entrepreneur, put his Osborne 1 computer on the market, small had never seemed so beautiful. Despite its graceless design—a cross between a World War II field radio and a shrunken instrument panel of a DC-3—the 24-lb. machine combined most of the features of a fully loaded Apple or Radio Shack computer. Better yet, it was completely portable. Sales immediately took ...

When Amazon.com announced its plan to open a digital music store to sell MP3s, you had to really work to get excited about it. It's hard to think of a press release that would be less surprising. At this rate, my 3-year-old daughter will be opening a digital music store pretty soon. And Amazon's selling MP3s? It's a digital music store. What else would it sell? But Amazon's move was actually a strategic salvo in the great secret war of ...

Randall Wentz works for the University of Wisconsin, vetting scholarship applications. He is a public employee, a union member. He makes $30,000 per year. We are sitting in a Madison, Wis., tavern with five of Randall's friends. All have 6-year-olds; they became friends through their children. All are public employees. Several are computer techies who make $60,000 a year. One is a middle school music teacher. These are educated, decent people, open and friendly in the Wisconsin way. They seem in equal parts flummoxed ...

If you're like most computer users, your PC or Mac is loaded with a gazillion family photos and other prized documents. Some of you may be sleeping peacefully believing that the external hard drive you picked up at Costco is backing up your data every night, but have you ever checked to see if it's configured correctly? What's really going on inside that black box? And what would happen if your house caught fire? One high-tech — and ...

You don't have to spend much time with teenagers to know that the average adolescent would rather devote an afternoon to sitting in front of the TV, computer or video-game console than working out in a gym. And in recent years, as physical-education classes have been progressively cut from cash-strapped public-school curriculums, teens have had even more time to lounge, slouch, hang out or do anything but break a sweat. It's no surprise, then, that obesity rates among ...

When Yahoo! switched off the servers for GeoCities, the Web posting service, on Oct. 27, some 7 million of the Internet's first websites went dark forever. The bulk of these were people's personal home pages, which were pulled offline with no backup and no permanent record of those users' frenetic early forays online. Now a ragtag effort by several groups of budding computer historians is feverishly — and angrily — trying to bring as much as they ...

It was 1969 and a busy year for making history: Woodstock, the Miracle Mets, men on the moon -- and something less celebrated but arguably more significant, the birth of the Internet.