The goal of IBM Programming Contest Central is to promote Computer Science and Information Technology opportunities to high school students. We encourage high school students, high schools and post-secondary institutions to use the resources provided in order to host their own programming contests. We also want to build a community of high school Computer Science teachers by providing the chance to network and share resources with each other.
"PCjs is an IBM PC simulator written entirely in JavaScript. The configuration below specifies a clock speed of 4.77Mhz, with 64Kb of RAM and a monochrome display, using the original IBM PC Model 5150 ROM BIOS and MDA font ROM. For greater control, there's a configuration with a Control Panel and the PCjs Debugger."
IBM this week announced a cloud-based collaborative software development tool that's being offered free to students now for academic use only but is expected to become a commercial service at some point in the future.
In the fall of 1977, I experimented with a newfangled PC, a Radio Shack TRS-80. For data storage it used-I kid you not-a cassette tape player. Tape had a long history with computing; I had used the IBM 2420 9-track tape system on IBM 360/370 mainframes to load software and to back-up data. Magnetic tape was common for storage in pre-personal computing days, but it had two main annoyances: it held tiny amounts of data, and it was slower than a slug on a cold spring morning. There had to be something better, for those of us excited about technology. And there was: the floppy disk.
Watson, the IBM computer created to be a champ-challenging contestant on Jeopardy!, chewed up and spat out humanity's finest knights of trivia Wednesday night in a $77,147 drubbing of past record winners Ken Jennings ($24,000 total) and Brad Rutter ($21,600).