Former President of '80's Computer Leader Commodore Sees PC Recyling 'A Reality' with Symbio Technologies' Plan.NEW ROCHELLE New Rochelle (rōshĕl`), city (1990 pop. 67,625), Westchester co., SE N.Y., on Long Island Sound; settled by Huguenots 1688, inc. as a village 1858, as a city 1899. , N.Y. -- It was the summer of 1981, the IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) (R) PC was about to be unveiled, and the king of computers was Commodore with its popular VIC-20 and even-more-popular Commodore 64 nearing introduction. That's when James Finke, Commodore's president, made an oft-quoted comment, envisioning "a time in the not-too-distant future when you could go down to the used computer lot and find a computer you could fix up and use." Little did he know the "future" was more than 20 years away. That's when Gideon Romm and Roger Del Russo, both just entering elementary school elementary school: see school. when Finke looked into his crystal ball, co-founded Symbio Technologies, which develops and deploys systems using Linux-based thin clients. They drew Finke's attention with their "True Recycler Symbio Technologies Uses Old PCs as Diskless Thin Clients in New Linux-Based Systems" announcement (Business Wire, May 20). Del Russo said the announcement was prompted by an article in The New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of Times on how Dell(R) and Hewlett-Packard(R) wanted to assume more financial responsibility for PC recycling. "These giants stand to sell more new PC's if future diskless thin clients are destroyed," Del Russo said. "It's planned obsolescence Planned obsolescence (also built-in obsolescence [UK]) is the decision on the part of a manufacturer to produce a consumer product that will become obsolete and/or non-functional in a defined time frame. selling new PCs that age and get destroyed. That's their idea of recycling. I couldn't believe it, and told Gideon, 'they're taking away future diskless thin clients from our solution, The Symbiont symbiont /sym·bi·ont/ (sim´bi-ont) (sim´be-ont) an organism living in a state of symbiosis. symbiont an organism or species living in a state of symbiosis. (TM), and Linux(TM), instead of donating them to schools or reselling them.'" The Symbio Technologies' plan takes old PCs, even Pentium(R) I systems, and brings them back to life as diskless thin clients by removing hard drives, CD-ROMs, and floppy disk drives, and connects them to a server running The Symbiont Management Suite(TM). "Then," said Romm, "businesses, schools or government agencies will have robust, new workstations that run as fast as the servers - born-again PCs with no moving parts Moving parts are the components of a device that undergo continuous or frequent motion, most commonly rotation. "Parts" only include the mechanical components which does not include fuel, or any other gas or liquid. to break, no embedded software to update or to become corrupted, and use far less energy than the outdated PC's that spawned them. And with no virus threats on the desktop!" he said. Former Commodore chief Finke agrees, saluting Del Russo and Romm as well. "When I heard about their plan, I was dazzled," he said. "This is what the IT industry should be all about - building on what has been done, moving ahead with limited waste. Their recycling scenario is ingenious, a reality, and should be a model for the future advancement of the worldwide computer industry," he said. About Symbio Technologies Based in the New York City New York City: see New York, city. New York City City (pop., 2000: 8,008,278), southeastern New York, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The largest city in the U.S. suburb of New Rochelle, Symbio Technologies (www.symbio-technologies.com) develops and deploys Linux-based thin client products and services. The Symbiont Management Suite is a trademark of Symbio Technologies. Other trademarks are properties of their respective owners. |
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