Both the Vanishing Seattle book and the September Belltown Messenger are outta here and on their way to your adoring eyes. So I can now resume this here corner of what used to be euphemistically called “Cyberspace.”
Among the things I haven’t gotten the time to write about these past almost two weeks:
- The 25th anniversary of the first IBM PC. Personal computers had already been around a half decade. IBM saw the character-generating on the wall and realized it had to be in that market, before its own sub-mainframe workstation computers were obsolete. An “Entry Level Systems Division” was set up in Florida, far from IBM’s mainframe designers in upstate New York. A workable and expandable machine was swiftly designed, mostly from off-the-shelf parts. Corporate schmoozing between IBM bigwigs and UW Regent Mary Gates got Mary’s son Bill the chance to bid on the operating system contract. He bought the existing QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from a couple of Seattle nerds. His then-small staff made two variants, PC-DOS (for IBM) and MS-DOS (which, under the MS/IBM contract, Gates & co. could sell to anybody). From this one deal arose the Puget Sound country’s new #1 economic force, the driver of real-estate hyperinflation and the flow of money into local “alternative” culture.
The first sign of hope for saving the Sonics and Storm. The Okie owners say they’d be perfectly happy with staying in Seattle Center, as long as it’s not in KeyArena. They suggested the Memorial Stadium land, already set to be cleared under a blue-ribbon committee’s master plan for the Center grounds. That’d be perfect with me. The high school football games can go to Husky Stadium or even Qwest Field. KeyArena can be re-remodeled as a concert and convention facility. We can get an indoor arena big enough for a National Hockey League team, plus the food-court and amusement-arcade sections the Okies want. I may be the only one I know who believes this deal can indeed be worked out without excessively draining local tax coffers, but I do believe it.
Safeco Insurance plans to leave the U District; the UW plans to buy the Safeco Tower. Let’s just make sure the U keeps the IHOP, next to the tower on Safeco-owned land.
A dog-days lull in the Seattle Times/Post-Intelligencer soap opera. I’ve been talking with others who, like me, would like to be involved in starting a new local-news venture should the P-I call it a day. Should this project progress, and should I become a real part of it, I’ll wind up saying less and less about it due to the ol’ non-disclosure falderal.
