IT GuidePoint Corporation's five-star rated team educates and trains SMB executives on how to assess, select, and optimize their core business systems (ERP)
Thank you, @saveusmfg! Michele Nash-Hoff’s new article “Why It Is Critical to Reshore IT Services” explains why reshoring IT services is critical for American manufacturers and our Main Street economy. Read the full article here: https://t.co/IpLzTeQPUM
#Reshoring #MadeInUSA #USManufacturing
Hire Americans FIRST!! Not H1B cheap labor!
Tech giants are firing Americans and replacing them with visa workers for profit. This is economic treason.
America must put American workers BEFORE foreign applicants. 🇺🇸
The original laptop lifestyle. $1,795 in 1981 dollars for a 24-pound 'portable' computer. And you think your MacBook Pro is heavy. #RetroTech#TechHistory
💾 Today in tech history, one of the most unlikely icons in computing quietly showed up for work — and accidentally changed everything.
In 1971, @IBM introduced the first floppy disk. It wasn't built for consumers, or even "users" in any modern sense of the word. It was a practical fix, a way to load microcode into mainframe storage systems without physically swapping out hardware. It held about 80 kilobytes of data. Today, that wouldn't cover a decent email signature.
Nobody was trying to invent a new category. They were just trying to make something easier. But once engineers realized you could move data this way — carry it, copy it, hand it to someone across a room or mail it across the country, the door cracked open to something much bigger.
Alan Shugart, who managed the project at IBM, eventually left to found Shugart Associates, which became the dominant floppy drive manufacturer and helped push the format squarely into the personal computer era. The original 8-inch disks were fragile and awkward, so the industry moved to 5¼-inch, then to the 3½-inch version with the hard shell and sliding metal shutter. That's the one most people remember. Tough enough to survive a backpack. Still somehow able to fail spectacularly at the worst possible moment.
By the 80s and 90s, floppies were everywhere. Software distribution, file sharing, backups all of it ran through them. Before networks reached most desks, people shared files by handing each other disks, which the industry charmingly called "sneakernet." If you were in tech back then, you remember labeling disks with names that made perfect sense at the time and zero sense a week later. And the creeping dread of a read error mid-install. Windows 95 shipped on 13 floppy disks — each one installed one at a time. More than 5 billion floppies were sold annually at the peak of it in the mid-1990s.
And then it faded, the way all utility eventually does. CDs, USB drives, then the cloud made the whole format feel quaint overnight.
What survived is the symbol. That little floppy disk icon still means "save" even on software used by people who've never held one, never heard a drive grinding through a bad sector, never had to label a disk at all.
Not bad for something that started as a workaround inside a mainframe lab and ended up teaching an entire generation what it meant to own your data.
@IBMResearch@IBMDeveloper
Trending on HN right now: Artemis II just launched and it's the biggest story on the internet. We're going back to the Moon with humans for the first time since Apollo. This is the kind of moonshot (literally) that reminds you what we're capable of when we focus.
https://t.co/VtWLtpln87
APPROVED: FCC Proposes Call Center Onshoring, English Proficiency Requirements 🇺🇸
“American consumers deserve call centers that speak proficient English, provide clear answers, and are based here at home.” - Chairman @BrendanCarrFCC 🧵⬇️
Is your team struggling with systems that do not communicate, reports that do not meet your needs, or legacy core business systems that do not meet today’s expectations? @itguidepoint can help with local U.S. citizen talent.
We have resources with strong skills and excellent references available in the following areas:
1. Technical experts who can connect different software systems/platforms using Boomi
2. Data resources who turn your data into clear, useful reports & dashboards that can help you make better decisions using tools such as Power BI and Tableau
3. IT executives who specialize in selecting and optimizing your core business systems (often called ERP)
If this interests you, email [email protected] or [email protected]. Reply below if that is easier.
We are happy to set up a quick no-obligation call. Thanks! @itguidepoint
#MidwestManufacturing #CoreBusinessSystems #USITtalent