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So, when Team 7-Eleven toed the line at the start of the 1986 Tour, its impact was a total unknown and many fans and teams questioned their invitation. Just as was the case this year, back in 1986, the Tour organizers personally selected every team for the race. The UCI was just a sanctioning organization and had virtually no input into the decision on who should race. Team Director Jim "Och" Ochowicz had several meetings with the Tour bosses and the crafty "Och" somehow convinced the organization that his boys could ride.

Thirty years ago, on June 8, 1978, Intel Corp. introduced its first 16-bit microprocessor, the 8086, with a splashy ad heralding "the dawn of a new era."

Computers for the home have been envisioned by science fiction writers and engineers ever since a huge, unwieldy prototype was developed 25 years ago. The whole futuristic age they prophesied, with an omnipotent electronic monster named Horace in every living room, is still a long way from realization, but compact consumer computers have quietly entered the household. While the market hardly rivals TV sets or refrigerators, the computer-as-home-appliance is now more than just a toy for the wealthy or a mysterious instrument for technical specialists. Those pioneer families who have one, like the Theodore Rodmans of Ardmore, Pa., have discovered their obedient machine can perform a large variety of useful functions. Dr. Rodman originally brought it home for medical research, but then his family found it could also plan mortgage payments, help out with homework, even play with the children. Although the cost is still high, computers like theirs have come within possible reach of a two-car family budget. A small, self-contained model is available for $8,000, complete. The Rodmans’ computer system, called time-sharing, uses a Teletype terminal connected to a big central unit via telephone. It costs $110 a month to rent, plus $7.50 per hour of use.

As computers become more and more prevalent, writing has come to mean typing on a keyboard. But there is a man, known as the God of Fountain Pens by pen aficionados, who still continues to handcraft pens nibs even now.

Judging by the prominence of honey these days, you'd think there's a run on sugar. Local, flavored honeys are now in restaurant kitchens. Foodies are mail-ordering artisanal raw varieties. At my local farmers market in Connecticut, the area beekeeper shows up with a table's worth of options and a glassed-in buzzing hive. This resurgence is in spite of the recent colony collapse disorder, which decimated many beehives. But even more unexpected is the rise of honey for an ancient use: alcohol, in a drink known as mead.

I wanted to highlight a few of my favorite GTD posts from the past four years. We talk about lots more than GTD here, but it’s definitely a lot of my readers’ favorite topic.

Your TV's full of dirty stuff. Electronic circuit boards, batteries, and color cathode ray tubes (CRTs) can contain hazardous materials such as lead, mercury and hexavalent chromium. Ooh, yeah... chromium. That stuff's even nastier than what's in your bedside drawer.

In all states, cyclists are deemed by law to be drivers of vehicles and are entitled to the same rights on the road as motorists. Expect cyclists on the road. Watch for cyclists on the road. Treat them as you would any slow-moving vehicle.

There are many reasons businesses and individuals want to stick with XP, rather than replace it with Vista. Check out some of the reasons from InfoWorld's analyses and other sources.

Hitachi Ltd. (Charts) says its researchers have successfully shrunken a key component in hard drives to a nanoscale that will pave the way for quadrupling today's storage limits to 4 terabytes for desktop computers and 1 terabyte on laptops in 2011.

The analysis indicates that in the U.S. current tax and fee payments to the government by motor-vehicle users fall short of government expenditures related to motor-vehicle use by approximately 20-70 cents per gallon of all motor fuel. (Note that in ...

Allen's approach is not inspirational. Instead, it is detailed and dry. But within his advice about how to label a file folder or how many minutes to allot to an incoming email there is a spiritual promise. He says there is a state of blessed calm av...

"Another decade, a decade and a half, I think we'll hit something fairly fundamental" that would render the continuing pace of Moore's law untenable, Moore said on Tuesday at Intel's twice-annual technical conference, now in its 10th year.

All this focus on laptops as the problem is a red herring. Whether you’re running a meeting with a rampant laptop problem or sitting in a meeting where you have no role, the actual problem is that someone doesn’t understand the value of the meeting.

Why Apple tends not to sell to the Enterprise

Description of the outage that took out Vox