Q. If Bill Gates owns 270,797,000 shares of Microsoft stock and Microsoft sells at $136 a share, then Bill’s stock is worth $36.83 billion. If Atty. Gen. Janet Reno fines Bill $1 million a day for being a monopolist, how long can Bill hold out?
A. Bill will be dead broke in 100 years 10 months and 24 days.
THE INTERNET
SEARCHING WITH CLASS
It’s called Ebig and with it fusty old Encyclopaedia Britannica moves beyond its famous 75-pound-per-set ink on paper books into cyberian weightlessness. Free www.ebig.com debuts this week as a high class Web index endorsed by the venerable albeit embattled Chicago-based reference publisher. It’s like Yahoo! or Excite! only classier–put together without advertising by Britannica scholars instead of profit-hungry propeller heads.
A catch? Of course. Among things you can’t get for free on Ebig is the content of Britannica’s own 32-volume encyclopedia, which continues to cost on-line subscribers $8.50 per month. A CD ROM of the encyclopedia now costs $150 and those actual book sets cost $1,500. Oh, yes, there’s also a $50 charge to truck them to your house.
DOING GOOD
GIVE ‘EM CYBER SHELTER
Dean Henry Perritt of Chicago Kent College of Law is off to battle-battered Bosnia this week seeking a safe place in the shadow of sniper’s alley where Kent’s Project Bosnia volunteers can set up a $20,000 Internet server computer (donated by Sun Microsystems Inc.) as a countermeasure to the indicted war criminals who control local print and broadcast media.
Those who modem their way behind enemy lines by making a local call to the server will share information and also reach out on the World Wide Web to tell their stories censor-free. View their window on a dangerous world from the safety of your desktop at www.project-bosnia.org.
HOT HARDWARE
ADIOS, IOMEGA?
Iomega Corp. has made hundreds of millions of dollars selling 100 megabyte ZIP storage gadgets that plug into the printer ports on PCs or SCSI connections on Macs and hold huge amounts of data for today’s gigantic picture, sound and movie files. Now there’s a dangerous new kid gunning for ZIP. Minnesota-based Imation Corp., a 3M Corp. spin off, is flooding computer stores with its sleek new 120-megabyte SuperDisk.
SuperDisk not only holds more than the ZIP drives, but it reads ordinary 1.4 meg floppies pushed into the same slot. This means that manufacturers can simply include a super disk drive in place of the regular floppy drives on new machines at a far lower price than it would take to add a ZIP. NEC Technologies Inc. and Compaq Computer Corp. already are assembling computers with the Imations in place of regular floppy drives.
