Bits and pieces ...

Press, 2 July 1985, Page 28

Bits and pieces ...

Mr Steve Jobs, a cofounder of Apple and chairman of Apple’s board, has been removed from the operational management of the company and will take on a more global role in product innovations and strategies. The move is part of a major reorganisation of Apple, ending the structure set up last year in which the company was organised around the Apple II and Macintosh families.

Now the company will be divided into a manufacturing, product development, operations and distribution division, and a marketing division.

Mr Jobs, who is now in Eruope on. a promotional tour and holiday, will continue as chairman.

ICL has won the Queen’s award for technological

achievement for its innovative work in developing its content-addressable file store information search processor. The processor enables data files held on ICL mainframe computers to be searched and retrieved up to 100 times faster than conventional methods. * » ♦ Skellerup Microsystems, Ltd, in Christchurch, is developing software which will permit IBM, Burroughs or Wang microcomputers to act as terminals to Burroughs mainframe computers. Two New Zealand students, aged between 16 and 18, will get a free trip to a schools’ congress in Melbourne in September, courtesy of the Australian and New Zealand Computer Societies

The aim of the one-day congress is to give students a better understanding of how computers are used. Students wishing to be considered for one of the places are asked to contact the Computer Society’s Wellington office.

Marac has installed a $4 million Prime 9950 superminicomputer which will support a nation wide network of up to 200 terminals. The new computer will use an Australian banking package used by three Australian financial institutions.

The two million Xerox copiers in use world wide make a total of about one billion copies a day, says the company.

The chief executive officer of Xerox told shareholders at the annual meeting recently that the company is poised for profitable

growth in spite of mixed financial results in 1984. * * ♦ A Computer Society seminar to be held in Christchurch on July 16 will examine relational databases. Relational databases are now considered to be the ideal method of storing data in a computer. Almost all new databases running on micro-computers are relational databases, but very few databases in larger computers are relational. The seminar, presented by a senior lecturer in computer science at the University of Otago, Dr lan McDonald, will cover the theoretical and practical aspects of relational databases and finish with a summary of where a relational database fits into the over-all data processing scene. _____